Blog September 14–20
What did you do this past week?
I started the week by wrapping up the collatz project. By Monday I was lucky enough to have a working solution that just needed a few extra test cases and the finishing touches. I ran into a strange issue running some of the tests from the public test repo, which failed for myself and the classmates I asked. We later discovered that the issue came from formatting with carriage returns rather than new line characters, which were caught by diff.
Other than the project, I got a nice review of exceptions and types, and am looking forward to the first big project!
What’s in your way?
The biggest hurdle for this class right now is figuring out our topic for IDB1. Our group has had some inconclusive back and forth, but are hoping to decide by tonight.
What will you do next week?
Next week we can get going with the project. I am assuming the first big task will be nailing down some APIs for data. Hopefully that will give us some more direction with how we can best present it. More generally, this upcoming week will be the time for preliminary design ideas and getting a closer look at our options for tools.
What was your experience with exceptions, IDB1, and types?
Exceptions and types were nice to look at closely Python, but weren’t anything new to me. I have the most extensive experience with them in Java and a lot of the same principles apply. It was nice to hear a concrete use for an else block, as I hadn’t previously been able to come up with one.
Jumping into IDB1 ought to be a unique challenge. I have limited web development experience which doesn’t include API scraping. Adding that and general web development to my skill set will be great. I signed up for software development to learn new development tools and for the chance to work on something like this.
What made you happy this week?
This weekend I got to run home and visit my family, which means seeing the dogs! I am definitely happy to stop by and spend a bit of time with my family. Sadly, I can’t linger too long or else none of my work will get done.
tip-of-the-week
I hope this counts, but the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this was to try and enjoy the weather. We are finally out of hottest parts of the year and it is more necessary than ever to step outside for even just 10 minutes to get your eyes off of a computer screen. The short break will easily outweigh losing a few minutes of coding, since you come back refreshed with a different perspective. I know you can find apps out there that will help schedule your work better by sliding in little breaks, but I personally prefer more spontaneity.
