CS 373 Fall 2020: Samantha Tuapen

Hi everyone! This is my sixth blog post for CS 373: Software Engineering

What did you do this past week?

I spent the first half of the week finishing up Phase I of the IDB project. My group spent a lot of time over the weekend doing the brunt work of the phase so we wouldn’t have to rush and stress in the weekdays leading up to the deadline. Big shout out to the TAs Larry and Adam for holding extra office hours and even extending their hours to help my group and many other students, even on the evening of the Presidential Debate. My group and I took a well-deserved night off from working on the IDB after submitting it on Wednesday, but the next day we dove right into planning out our game plan for Phase II.

What’s in your way?

For the first time this semester, nothing at the moment :) After working through Phase I, I feel like my group and I have a better understanding of how to work with each other’s dynamics and taking the time last week to make our game plan for Phase II is helping make this part of the project a little less daunting that it first seemed.

What will you do next week?

This upcoming week, I will make significant progress in implementing our Flask API (since I’m working on the backend stack for my group) and hopefully accomplish the deliverables we aimed to complete by this Wednesday and Friday. I also know I will take advantage of Piazza and office hours earlier on in this phase than in the last, since I don’t want to have to stress about both the project and midterms concurrently next week.

What did you think of Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?

This paper was definitely an eyeopener for me that gender biases, workplace gaslighting, and holding women to double standards are issues that are (surprisingly) still prevalent in the tech world today. I’ve been fortunate that I haven’t personally experienced the injustices mentioned in the paper yet — especially because I’m involved with WiCS (women in computer science) on campus and my internship experience has been positive and rewarding thus far —but this paper sheds light that though the gender disparity in tech is being discussed more now than in the past, the actions being made to change this aren’t nearly as drastic and quick as they should be. I hope that tech companies reform their hiring practices/cultures to genuinely be more inclusive of women and minorities and allow them to grow and thrive in their passions as opposed to making these changes as a performative act.

What was your experience of iterators, reduce(), and tuple?

I understood that iterators are an intermediate object that allows multiple clients to iterate through the same container at the same time. However, I learned that iterators are not the most efficient way of iterating through Python containers because its performance with a try-except block is nowhere near the efficiency of using a for-in range() loop. Like Professor Downing says, “don’t reinvent the wheel!” I also learned more about tuples and the various subtleties in concatenating two tuples, like when two tuples are concatenated it makes a new tuple rather than modifying the original (since tuples are immutable). I also learned about reduce and it’s a very efficient when wanting to apply a binary function to a sequence of elements.

What’s it like working in a group?

Working in a group makes me spend my time more productively by not getting distracted easily as to not waste my group members’ time. It’s also helpful to have other people to bounce ideas off of and to learn from. This IDB project would be so overwhelming for just one person, but when divided among a group of people it’s more digestible. It’s also more exciting to celebrate small victories on the project with more people.

What was your experience of the team contract?

The team contract was a great way to make sure everyone in my group is on the same page in terms of roles, responsibilities, meeting schedules, and quality of work. Even if we didn’t have to fill out the team contract, I’m sure my group and I would’ve organized ourselves in the same manner intuitively, but it’s nice to have all that written down for everyone to see and agree to, which helps with accountability and minimizes instances of miscommunication.

What was your experience of the peer review?

I find it very valuable to fill out peer reviews because it allows me to reflect on the actions of everyone on the team, appreciate all the work that was put in by each individual, and brainstorm ways to improve our group as a whole.

What made you happy this week?

Despite my hectic schedule of lectures, phone interviews, and group meetings, I was able to find time to call and catch up with some old friends — as well as get to know new ones — and overall just take some time to myself to break up the monotonous cycle of eat->sleep->code->repeat.

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

For technical interview prep, I used to think the most thing is to get coding-practice in through sample problems, but now I know to also take time to review basic data structures, algorithms, comp arch/OS (if related to your target role) and the structure of your programming language of choice for the interview. I know I’ll never be exposed to every single type of problem that could be asked on those calls, but at least I can explain my thought process and layout of my solution verbally which could help lead me to a written solution.

Thanks for reading this extra-lengthy post! Hope you’re having a great start to a spooky month :)