CS373 Spring 2020: Yichen Zhang

What did you do this past week?

For phase IV, I did visualizations for our website. I did not try to learn d3 from scratch. There were a lot of templates available and it wasn’t too hard to make pretty visualizations for ourselves. I had a Math take-home exam this Monday. It took me almost half a day. It wasn’t too bad, but I kind of miss the feeling of taking timed-exams. For the rest of last week, I’ve been working on the Computer Vision project about Structure-from-motion. I felt like I understood the algorithm pretty well, but so far, my program does not produce the expected result. It was frustrating because I followed exactly what the documentation and lectures told us to do.

What’s in your way?

Computer Vision. It’s becoming very difficult as the semester is coming to an end. Materials after Spring break involve a lot of linear algebra. Although Dr. Huang does not require us to fully understand each step of an algorithm, simply putting all the steps together can be hard.

What will you do next week?

Our team will finish up making a video presentation for our website tomorrow. I guess most teams like us will not do a live presentation. All lectures next week might play these videos. I will get started studying for the second round of exams. My major focus next week will be on Computer Vision and Cloud Computing. Taking lectures and reviewing them will be very time-consuming.

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

I don’t have a lot of experience with refactoring before these lectures. I think refactoring plays an important role in large-scale programs. Eliminating getters and setters and moving as much computation inside the most relevant class as possible is a great way to avoid mistakes and make projects more scalable.

What made you happy this week?

Making food every day made me happy. Good food is the best part of my life.

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

Stanford Computer Vision course has more detailed slide sets. I used them a lot for reviewing lectures.