What did you do this past week?
This past week, I was finalizing my schedule and attending a few computer science events. As a highlight, I attended the UTPC programming competition. I managed to use a few techniques I learned last semester in competitive programming, including using binary search to approximate a mathematical solution. I also met my research group for the first time this semester. They all are definitely very smart and everyone brings something different to the group. I think we will get a lot of research done and hopefully be able to publish a scientific paper by the end of the semester.
What’s in your way?
The only thing in my way this semester is just getting back into the groove of my classwork workflow. Once I get used to it again, I will be back to my normal productive self.
What will you do next week?
This next week I will be doing a lot of programming for a multitude of my classes. I need to refactor my code that I wrote last semester for my research and finish up the Collatz project in this class. In addition, I am peer-mentoring for my freshman research initiative (FRI). For this responsibility, I am holding office hours and grading student homework assignments.
What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, coverage, and continuous integration? (this question will vary, week to week)
Even though I already was exposed to many of these concepts previously, using specialized tools was interesting and helpful. I have used unit testing in my code, but it was not using a library. Continuous integration is a concept that makes a lot of sense and I hope my future workplaces will use that technique.
What made you happy this week?
Being able to solve a lot of problems by myself in the programming competition was very satisfying and fulfilling.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is http://utcatalyst.org/grade-distributions. UT Catalyst is a tool that allows students to look at grade distributions among classes in previous years. Even though many students know about this, I was surprised to know that some don’t. It is a great tool to scope out possible classes to know how much effort you probably need to put in to achieve a high grade.
