CS371p Spring 2021 Week 2: Yichen Zhang

What did you do this past week?

Doing things regularly. I get to go outside for jogging every day, which is a habit I started a month ago. I spent a lot of time coding the self-driving car algorithm and more time debugging and finally, I realized there was no bug in my code. It was the simulator that was malfunctioning.

What’s in your way?

Procrastination. I should have completed graduate school applications way before today. Since November last year, I’ve been preparing materials for the application. Everything else is ready except for the Personal Statement/Statement of Purpose. I’ll have to look up research projects and faculties on school websites and write about which ones interest me.

What will you do next week?

I don’t have plans for next week yet. For OOP, I want to get a head start on the Collatz project. I think it’s going to be interesting to follow the workflow as I work on the project. It’s a great software development practice. Although I took SWE with Dr. Downing and did a Python version of this project a year ago, I wasn’t familiar with all those tools, not even git. I hope this time after I’m equipped with the knowledge of cloud computing and a better sense of programming, I would finish this project without difficulty.

If you read it, what did you think of the makefile?

I think it’s very useful and sophisticated. After taking about an hour going through it, reading annotations, and searching for things that are confusing to me, I have a better grasp of what it’s trying to do. I wrote my own makefile along the way to clarify the functionality of some symbols and function calls.

What was your experience of Docker? (this question will vary, week to week)

I’ve used Docker before in Cloud Computing. It’s trendy now because it’s a docker image is easier to deploy and is more lightweight than a VM. I’ve worked more with Kubernetes, a container orchestration tool, that manages all containers.

What was your experience of assertions? (this question will vary, week to week)

I use assertions all the time, no matter what language I code in. Dr. Downing mentioned a great point in class that assertions are also comments for how you expect the program to behave. Using assertions can effectively help you detect some run-time errors in your program.

What was your experience of unit tests? (this question will vary, week to week)

I used unit tests in SWE, particularly in the last several phases of web application development. I haven’t used unit testing since then.

What made you happy this week?

Meeting up with friends I have met since the pandemic started. Last night, I went to her place, ate dinner, and played board games. It was really fun.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Jupyter Notebook is widely used by Data Scientists. It’s a very intuitive tool for data manipulation and analysis.