CS 373 Spring 2023: Tara Sophia Roshan

Post #3

• What did you do this past week?

I finished up a lot of homework, had some meetings for AWM, etc. Looking back on my calendar, I spent most of this week either finishing homework from the previous weeks and going to meetings (either for planning or just for fun). The week before had spontaneous hangouts with friends, which I kind of miss.

• What's in your way?

In terms of schoolwork and career, I need to do more preparation: reading my algorithms textbook, finishing up more homework to feel confident in the material, applying to places, etc. In terms of my mood, I need to plan an adventure! I want this coming week to feel more fun! But I don't want to push my work to the wayside, of course.

I drafted most of this blog post yesterday (Saturday) and I am now (Sunday) happy to report that I had a spontaneous game of pickleball followed by dinner with my friends! Yippee!
• What will you do next week?

Probably sit down in the Tower Library (Life Sciences) and do lots of work. Also try to work on my personal project -- it'd be really awesome if I could get a significant bit of it done in time to show it to my brother this weekend!

• What did you think of Paper #3: Continuous Integration?

I think it was a really nice way to formally tie together what I'd been learning about over my past internship and my experience with trying to create a website using Next.js and GitHub Pages. I'm really excited to set up CI/CD with this more foundational background now.

• What was your experience of exceptions and types? (this question will vary, week to week)

Exceptions make intuitive sense to me (so far), but I'm having a bit of trouble remebering types. My biggest issue is that tuples remind me of vectors:

The term tuple can often occur when discussing other mathematical objects, such as vectors.
-Wikipedia

But tuples don't use the square brackets that I associate with vectors! They use parentheses! And they're immutable (difficult for calculations, which I also associate with vectors)! For now, I find the naming for lists and tuples to be counterintuitive.

• What made you happy this week?

I met up with a friend on accident and we got really really close because we bonded over a niche shared interest and now I'm having so much fun teasing her over it! Also, my roommate gave me two cookies yesterday (edit: now the day before yesterday; I drafted this post on Saturday), which was very sweet of her. Especially considering that I burned the last one she gave me in the microwave last semester (the room smelled like smoke for four hours). I'm happy that my roommate and I are so similar but have enough small differences to be able to help each other grow.

• What's your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

I haven't tried it, but apparently interviewing.io helps with programming interviews. It markets itself as providing "anonymous mock interviews with engineers from [...] top companies." Let me know how it is if you end up checking it out.