CS373 Spring 2021: Vincent Huynh
Week of 8 Mar — 14 Mar
1. What did you do this past week?
I took a few exams this week and tried to finish as much work as possible for more free time over spring break. There are still some things I’ll have to work on, but at least my workload will be lighter next week. Our IDB group met yesterday to plan out Phase 2, so I’m feeling good about making more progress.
2. What’s in your way?
My family discovered a gas leak in our attic today, so we are trying to minimize our usage of the heater and open our windows until it gets fixed. Another roadblock this week was trying to build my CS 354 project on Windows. As it turns out, there were problems on my end as well as in the starter files, but it’s all solved now thankfully.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week is spring break! I will still be working on phase 2 of IDB this weekend, trying to straighten out our models and collecting data to populate our database. I will also be working on my CS 354 project and reviewing lecture notes.
4. If you read it, what did you think of the Liskov Substitution Principle?
I think the Liskov Substitution Principle is a good reminder that relationships in the real world are not always reflected in code because designing class relationships will depend on their actual behavior and uses.
5. What was your experience of iteration, comprehensions, generators, and digits iterator? (this question will vary, week to week)
My favorite applications of iteration so far are mapping and comprehensions. I’ve used mapping a lot in JavaScript, so it was interesting to learn how it is done in Python. I also appreciate the similarities between lambdas in Python and arrow functions in JavaScript. I know they are not the same, but both are very useful for mapping.
6. What made you happy this week?
I’m happy that spring break is finally here. It felt great to turn in my homework assignments one by one and know that nothing else will be due for another week.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
In our IDB project, we needed to put together data from API responses and data sources of different formats, such as JSON, CSV, and Excel into a single format for our own database. Pandas https://pandas.pydata.org/ is a Python library that allows for manipulating and converting between those different formats, which I think will be very useful in our project.
