CS373 Fall 2020: Jackson McClurg

Blog 10

1. What did you do this past week? This past week I finished up another coding assignment for another class, so I’m hoping that went well. I also had a final round interview and that went really well, so I’m waiting to hear back with my fingers crossed. I also talked with my team about how we could restructure the backend for our project to make it faster and easier for the frontend to work with. I’m going to get those updates and changes made this weekend so we have plenty of time to finalize by the time the project is due.
2. What’s in your way? Right now, not much is in my way except for some work that I have left to finish up. So, I’m pretty focused on handling that while preparing for a couple of interviews. Other than that, I’m mainly just stressed about the election.
3. What will you do next week? Next week I’m going to meet with my team to finalize Phase 4 of our assignment and get that finished up. I’m also going to have a couple of interviews as well, so I will be preparing for those. After all of that is taken care of, I’ll probably try to get a little ahead in my classes before Thanksgiving break and then take a bit of a rest!
4. If you read it, what did you think of The Interface Segregation Principle? I did read it. I thought it was a really interesting article and it raised several good points about how to properly structure code and highlighted some pitfalls to avoid.
5. What was your experience of instance methods, class methods, static methods, regular expressions, and relational algebra? (this question will vary, week to week) I thought what we learned this week in class was really cool and applicable! All of the types of methods were interested and seemed like they could be useful in our project, and the regex stuff definitely seemed super helpful. In fact, I’m going to try to use that for the work I have to do this weekend. The introduction to relational algebra also helped to clear up some concepts for me.
6. What made you happy this week? This week I got to celebrate my birthday on Tuesday with my family. We ordered some food, and just hung out and watched some TV. It wasn’t the 21st birthday I had in mind a year ago, but times are just really weird right now. It was still a lot of fun, and I’m glad that I’m even able to celebrate it at all.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? My tip of the week this week is to get out and vote next week on Tuesday. Even if you feel that the options of who to vote for don’t reflect your beliefs, you can still take the opportunity to choose the one that can best represent you. It’s important to be an active participant in your government, and your vote is one of the most powerful tools available to you. Go out and make your voice heard! If you are on campus in Austin, you can vote at the FAC, Greg, or Texas Hillel in West Campus.