CS373 Fall 2020: Jackson McClurg

Blog 12

1. What did you do this past week? This past week I spent a lot of time on an assignment for one of my other CS courses. It was really theoretical and involved lots of math, so it took quite a bit of effort to actually understand what was going on. However, after a good deal of struggling and working on it, I think I managed to piece together a working solution. It’s not as great as I would like it to be, but it was the best that I could come up with within the time I had available.
2. What’s in your way? Right now not much is in my way. I need to work with my team to once again make some improvements and optimizations to our database and backend so that our website works a lot faster and doesn’t crash. In terms of life circumstances and things like that everything is luckily going well right now, so I’m thankful for that.
3. What will you do next week? Next week I’m going to improve our backend (hopefully a lot) and work with my team to put together our presentation and get going on the stuff that we need to have finished for Phase 4. Our last phase didn’t go very well because our website crashed so I would like to do as well as possible on this last portion of our project.
4. If you read it, what did you think of The New Methodology? I did read it, it was one of my most enjoyed reads out of the ones assigned to us. I find the whole topic of Agile interesting, so I liked reading this article.
5. What was your experience with SQL? (this question will vary, week to week) SQL was a pretty good experience. I find that everything makes perfect sense when watching the lecture and seeing Professor Downing demonstrate things, but sometimes the next day I forget what I learned. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to understand, I just need to do some refreshing before class/the final.
6. What made you happy this week? I got to visit home for the weekend, so that means a comfy bed and lots of good food!
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? Sometimes we just have bad days. Sometimes our projects get bad grades, or we don’t do well on a test, or we can’t figure out a problem. It happens, and it’s not the end of the world. Just take what you can learn from it and move on to the next situation! Don’t let it hang over your head or bother you too much.