CS 373 Fall 2020: Samantha Tuapen

Hi everyone! This is my second blog post for CS373: Software Engineering

What did you do this past week?

I spent this past week trying to balance the stress of the first full week of classes for the semester and the new recruiting season. I was so thrilled to find out that this weekend is Labor Day weekend so I can recover and establish a better routine for myself.

What’s in your way?

Being in such close proximity to my bed all the time is definitely affecting my productivity. After every Zoom lecture, I jump straight into bed and convince myself that I deserve this ‘little’ break. Having to physically go to campus for lecture kept me away from the comforting distractions of my home since the trek back to my apartment was always my least favorite part of my day.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I’m going to really dive into Project 1 for CS 373 now that Professor Downing has discussed many ways to optimize our code and I’ve become more familiar with the project files. Syllabus week has come to an end and that means it’s time to take my courses more seriously.

What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, and coverage?

I am pretty familiar with unit tests since I was a software QA automation intern a couple summers back where I worked a lot with Jenkins and the NUnit unit-testing framework (primarily writing test cases for our test suites). It’s exciting to learn more about them in-depth since my experience with it has been application-based. I also took an intro to python course at UT a couple semesters ago and our professor utilized unit tests to grade our assignments as well as introduce us to basic assertions. As for coverage, I’ve never worked with it before but I’m excited to use it in this first project because it seems very handy for testing.

How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?

I’m doing way better than I expected I would be! Though I miss having my own place and being more independent, it’s been nice to spend more time with family, eat home-cooked meals more often, and be in the same city as many of my close friends from high school again after so long. The most helpful form of support for me at this time is just being around people I care about and feel comfortable with.

What made you happy this week?

I have synchronous classes starting 9:30am or 10am Monday through Friday so I’ve had to wake up earlier and it’s been correcting my sleep schedule! I used to be a morning person, but this pandemic made me the complete opposite. On top of that, meeting new people over Zoom is so fun and not something I was expecting out of this virtual semester. Also, after being in a music rut for the past half year, I finally found a song that just makes me want to dance and sing every time I hear it, so now it’s playing almost 24/7 in my head.

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

I usually use Zoom or Microsoft Teams when I need to video call someone in a more ‘professional’ context because I like to change or blur my background since my childhood bedroom doesn’t quite have a professional aesthetic…but I found out Google Meets doesn’t have a built-in ability to adjust backgrounds, so I downloaded this Chrome extension to blur my background and it’s pretty neat since you can adjust the amount of blur you want.

Thanks for reading my blog post this week! Hope y’all have a relaxing Labor Day weekend :)