Week 13 - A Good Week

Hey again,

We are back on an off week this week. By that I mean that there is nothing due or overly pressing this week to be worried about. Now that we have been working on the IDB main project, we have had a biweekly stress meter that runs up and down depending on when the next iteration is due.

So this past week, my team and I took some time to go over the new requirements for this project and try and lay it out a bit more structured in terms of front-end/back-end/mixed teams to get some work done on the project while we all have such different schedules. I think this was a good way to start, though checking in over the course of the week has been less than informative. Nonetheless, I think we are doing ok on time. Of course, this project completes this coming Thursday, so I can expect that as that day grows closer, we will be ramping up with work.

As far as the class goes, this past week we went over some more SQL stuff, and some design patterns. We took a look at the singleton pattern the previous Friday and on Monday we went over Reflection in Java. Still waiting to get to the Python version of this though.

Wednesday we had a guest speaker/lecture about working in the industry. This was probably one of the best talks I have heard in a class since I have been in school here. The main reason for this is that Trung Vu, from The Zebra, went through his slides very quickly and then had a lengthy Q&A section, which turned out to be really informative and helpful. He had worked at three different sized and types of companies since graduating four years previously, which I feel shed some really good light on to what could be expected shortly after graduation. I especially liked the tips and hints he gave about prepping for interviews as well as how to feel about working and timing and estimation. It made the class feel really relevant, and put the Django stuff that we have been working on in perspective. Overall it was a pretty good week.

But, now I have some other things to do.

~Sophie

Week 6 - Keeping On

Hi,

Thanks for coming back to see what happened this week in class. Unfortunately, without a project assigned and the test still a week out, there isn't really much to report.

One thing interesting did happen, and that is that Downing decided this semester to switch up the overall project format for the rest of the semester. What this means is that this semester we get to form teams and propose a project, more or less in the same vein as the project from the earlier iterations of the  class, but with something that may be more interesting for us to design than a site about world crises. Of course, our idea must be approved, but we still have some creative freedom, which is fun! Now I just need to figure out what team I'm in before it's decided for me.

On that note, I would like to let folks in my class who are looking for project partners know that I am available to group up. I know some web dev stuff and I'm alright with Python too.

Since the week was pretty chill, I'll take the rest of this post to continue on talking about the extra credit in the class. If you've taken a class with Dr. Downing before, you may already have an idea about all of this, but for those of you who don't know, there are a lot of opportunities in this class. One is the blog. We write a weekly post to you to tell you about the class in at least 350 words, and it is worth 10 points. Next, each of the earlier projects has an extra credit component. For Collatz, if you get your program to run really fast, and you can pass a different version of the problem, you get 5 points. For the second project, if you pair program you get 5 points. For Netflix, if you best the RMSE of 0.94... you get 5 points! If you write a blog post about an approved article, 10 points! And, if you create a portfolio to showcase your work, 10 points.

Hope that gives you some more insight into the class. I'll be back again next weekend.

~Sophie

Week 5 - Project 2 is Done

Hey,

This week project 2 - Netflix was due. I was able to work with a pair programmer, Keyon, on this one and we met up to get coding and just about finished it in one evening. So we turned it in relatively early when we thought we had it done. Little did we realize that we had not actually gotten the code running to spec, under one minute for reading in a ~1.4 million line text file along with calculating the RMSE values of our predicted movie rating data compared with that of the actual rating data. So our first attempt, while it did seem to solve the problem, still needed a bit of tweaking. Of course, we had to meet up again. After a bit more reading into the problem and a little refactoring of our code, we got it running in time and turned in the project a day before it was due. Then, the due date was extended. We could have used the time to try and get our prediction values to be even tighter, but we did not.

Most of the week in class we went over some of the neat little features that Python has including assignments and unpacking. During the last couple of weeks we touched a bit on Python generators, and for project 2 Keyon and I used a generator and some fun syntax that we had never seen used before in other languages. All in all, I think that this language can be a bit confusing, even after taking a programming languages course, when looking at the different types, and how list comprehension works. As soon as I felt like I had a grasp on some of it, we had a quiz, and I ended up mixing around what I thought would work and what I thought did not work. But, as I usually find is true for myself, making mistakes and being shown the correct answers helps me out in the long run to hopefully not make the same mistakes twice.

One new thing this week was the book we are reading. Our weekly assigned reading had us finish up the XP Installed book the week before last and onto Database Design with UML and SQL this week. This is the second of three books used in the class and is available online. Hooray for saving some money!

Well, with the project turned in and the weekend coming to a close I wonder if we will begin looking at some Project 3 information and get started with that, or if we will be diving even deeper into Python before continuing on that way. Our first test is next week, so it's definitely time to look back at what's been learned and taught thus far.

Talk to you next time,

Sophie

Week 3 - Project 1 is Done

Hi again,

So, Project 1 was due on Thursday. This project was one of the problems from Sphere Online Judge, spoj.com. This online oracle takes submissions for solutions to the huge project set they have, and "grades" your submission based on its ability to solve the problem as well as timing the solution. For the purposes of this project we wrote code in Python, and had to implement a cache in order to speed up our solution in addition to being one of the base requirements for getting a non-zero grade.

Dr. Downing gave us examples of the different types of caches available for us to use, and I found that with some tweaking and changing of my code, the fastest iteration that submitted was one with the simplest solution, a lazy cache. I later realized that had I not used recursion I probably could have sped up my code, but I did not go back to adjust it. I decided this time that the solution I turned in was good enough. And, because I know that the semester will ramp up pretty quickly with multiple deadlines and exams in the same week, I thought it would be better to use any extra time I had to be sure to be caught up in my classes for now.

Then, I was reminded that the career fair was on the same day that the project was due, and felt really glad that I got my project ready to be turned in ahead of time. The career fair was exhausting. I spent a lot of time talking to a bunch of different people about some of my past projects, what I like to do, why I would like to work for their company, or be a good fit, all while standing for hours, and feeling overly hot in that building. Even though the conditions can be overwhelming, I did enjoy talking with all of the recruiters and engineers, and know it was well worth it. I have some interviews coming up, and those require some study time too.

The next day in class we talked about Z scores, standard deviation and a root-mean-square (RMSE) problem. We went through some of the code for solving this problem in class, and we will be using this information for our next project, Netflix, which we will be learning about this coming week. I'm looking forward to hearing the specs on this one.

Reading this blog post over, it reads a bit disjointed to me, and I feel like I must be extra tired right now. The weather has been fluctuating between 30 degree ranges nearly every two days, and my allergies have been kicking my butt. I have been trying to keep from getting a cold, and stress is not a good agent for keeping the immune system high. So, I think I had better rest up, and stay on top of my studying.

I'll be back to write some more next week.

~Sophie

Week 2 - A One Day Week

Hey again,

Well the week was, as usual, a full 7 days, but due to unforeseen weather changes this class only met once. On Wednesday the proctor for the class, Alex Coomans, gave a lecture on getting started with git. We had a quiz at the start of class over the reading, which I found particularly straight forward having already read the two articles assigned to us in previous classes. Then with little time to spare at the end of the class we went over some of the Collatz changes that Dr. Downing made. He changed some of the starter source code for us from Python 2.7 to Python 3.

Because the class time this week was so short, there is not much to report on for the actual class experience. I think this may have put us back on schedule a bit as far as understanding how to improve the performance of our Collatz program. Our original schedule had us discussing caches on Friday, the day the school was closed due to inclement weather.

Outside of this, we have a discussion board for the class, Piazza, which gives us a forum to ask each other questions over the material, share what we know, and get helpful input from the TAs and Downing himself. He has this week been very forthcoming with his advice to us, imploring us to post on Piazza, and attend the weekly study sessions. I have already found a post there from a classmate about a feature of Python that is pretty cool.

There are two scheduled study sessions a week on Tuesday and Wednesday that we can attend in the evening to study for the class and help out our classmates with anything they may be uneasy on. The sessions are run by the TAs and proctor, all of whom have experience with the class structure and can be helpful with both the class assignments, as well as any general questions. And, this is time outside of their regular office hours. Sadly, however, I have not attended any of the sessions thus far. I have been easing into my new school/work/life schedule slowly, and I hope to be able to schedule myself to get to at least one a week. I know that these sessions can be immensely helpful with studying for the exams in the class, of which we have two coming up, and no formal final!

Despite the short week, I had enough to share about generalities of the class, and how they affect me, in order to reach our 350 word minimum requirement for the blog posts. And just in case I didn't make this explicit in the last post, this is an extra credit assignment. We are to write a weekly blog post to you the audience, who is hopefully interested in taking the class and wants some personal insight on it. I personally enjoy having this as an assignment as I think that it will help me to improve my writing skills, while also giving me some perspective on how I am doing in the class. We have two additional extra credit opportunities in the class, which I may expound upon later.

Until next week...

~Sophie

Week 1 - Course Description and Introduction to Project 1

Hi,

Here is a little recap of my first week of this class. On the first day we went over the course description and some of the details of turning assignments in, a daily quiz structure, and what books we will need for this class. Professor Downing said that this class has a writing flag, which everyone in CS needs,  and I believe is one reason that many students will opt to take this class. In order to fulfill this writing flag we have to write a 3000 word report! Wow. Luckily the professor said that we will be breaking this up, so it will not seem like a huge task.

Over the rest of the week we moved on to talking a bit about the Python programming language, and then specifically about the first assignment, which is done solo by each student. I found it quite helpful that Downing gave us pretty full Java code examples and then compared them to the same bits of code using Python, which is the main programming language in this course. I have not used much Python before, so getting started with a new language while getting started with the first project adds a bit of work, and the comparisons with a familiar language seem to make the transition easier. In addition to Python in this class we will be using many different languages and frameworks in order to get some experience with full stack programming. This should help to prepare us to get a job, and I like the sound of that!

On Friday we had our first quiz, which surprisingly took me by surprise with its questions. I thought I had a handle on it, but I missed a couple of simple details, and that is what good programming is all about! Happily, I am not worried about it this early into the semester. I have been having some severe allergy attacks lately due to the record pollen highs and overly long "Cedar Fever" season here, and feel like once my head clears up I will be able to gain my focus during quiz time.

I'll let you know how this next week goes!

~Sophie