CS373 Fall 2020: Jackson McClurg

Blog 11

1. What did you do this past week? This past week I spent a lot of time working on recreating our database for our project. We had to redesign our models so that they could hold better information, and so as a result we needed to migrate all of our data over to new tables. We also spent a lot of time scraping for more information as well.
2. What’s in your way? Right now not much is in my way. I’m just going through classes trying to make it to Thanksgiving break. I just have lots of school work and it seems to get harder as the semester goes on, so I’m excited and looking forward to a short break before finishing out the semester.
3. What will you do next week? Next week I’m going to spend some time trying to fix some issues with our database as well as try to get some more data to finalize our models. I think this would really help our team and our website as we enter into the final stretch of the semester. I want to do as much as I can so that we can end with a cool finished product that everyone is happy with. I also have a project for another class due in a few days so I’m going to try to get going on that as well. Unfortunately, I have a few lectures to catch up on.
4. If you read it, what did you think of The Dependency Inversion Principle? I did read it, and I thought it made a lot of good points on software design. It is very important to avoid three design pitfalls — rigidity, fragility, and immobility. These three things can make a program hard to use.
5. What was your experience of relational algebra in Python? (this question will vary, week to week) I thought that relational algebra was really cool. It made a lot of sense to me since I’ve kind of been using SQL on the backend for our project, but seeing it used in Python is a lot more readable and easier to understand for me. I’m glad that we’re taking the time to go over some of the key points and really learn about it.
6. What made you happy this week? This week I was really happy because I heard back from a company and got my first ever internship offer! It took three years, a lot of hard work and patience, and several hundred applications but it finally paid off. I’m just very excited to be able to work and experience what life might be like post-graduation.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? My pick-of-the-week is to make sure you are catching up on sleep. I know a lot of us just got through a bunch of midterms (or might still have some) and it’s really important to take care of your body so that you can perform your best.