CS373 Spring 2020: Yichen Zhang

What did you do this past week?

From Sunday to Tuesday, my main focus was on computer vision assignment. It took me a great amount of time reviewing the lectures which were directly related to what I needed to implement for this assignment. Computer Vision is the first AI class I take. A lot of linear algebra is involved, and it’s very different from any of the CS classes I have taken. For me, I think it’s fun in a way I can not describe. For the rest of my week, I spent some time on Cloud Computing and SWE project. I felt like our API for a model could be better, so I rewrote some code that grabbed data from another data source.

What’s in your way?

No motivation to stay awake is in my way. As soon as I get up, I am in my study/work mode. After two weeks, I think I become very comfortable to study at home. It’s nice getting settled into a routine. I can’t imagine that I went to the library every day before the spring break.

What will you do next week?

I’m going to review Computer Vision lectures I missed this past week. It’s time-consuming and difficult. I also need to work on my part for the SWE project. I have been trying to implement searching, filtering, and sorting from the frontend. Our api has been down for a couple of hours, so I need to wait until it is up and running.

What was your experience of SQL?

I barely had any experience with SQL. My first time using SQL, more specifically MySQL was three weeks ago on the Cloud Computing project. I have hoped to learn SQL by going through some online tutorials since my freshman year.

What was your experience of the ethics material?

I have been hearing this topic quite a lot. No experience at all.

What made you happy this week?

Making good food made me happy. Because of this pandemic, I get to spend more time with my family that I usually don’t have a lot of chance to.

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

In React, there are two ways to create a component, by using either a class or a function. Personally, I prefer class components, since I come from an oop background. But recently, I find there are some advantages of using functional components with the help of useEffect. They are much easier to read and test. If you use class-based component, you really need to think about the life cycle, which sometimes will result in unexpected errors.