CS 373 Fall 2020: Samantha Tuapen

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

What did you do this past week?

I finished a lot of different assignments for various companies that I’m in the interview process for. I also put lots of time and attention into my first project for Info Retrieval. All my company assignments and this project for IR have been in the Java language so it’s been a very Java-heavy week.

What’s in your way?

I’m stuck on the very first deliverable of my IR project which is stressing me out because I have to push other things off and rearrange the schedule I set for myself to accommodate for this setback. It’s not due until Wednesday and I’m emailing the TA to help me work through this block, so I hope I can make significant progress this weekend to lessen the workload on myself later during week and focus on my other classes. Though I try to be flexible with my time, I feel like I still haven’t found a good routine and balance to ensure I’m successful in all my classes. I’m usually really good about managing stress, but this past week was so monotonous (wake up -> eat -> code -> sleep) that I’m having trouble trying to find something to look forward to.

What will you do next week?

I met with my SWE group this morning and we have a good idea of what we want our proposal to be, so I believe we’ll work on making significant progress in Phase I of the project. In addition to that, I’ll be completing my project for IR and working on my Virtualization project (which unfortunately has been on the backburner for too long). I don’t have any interviews to prepare for this upcoming week, so I hope that gives me more time to reach all these goals.

What was your experience of exceptions, IDB1, and types?

I’ve only had basic experience with exception in Java programming, but I have a better understanding of it because of our lectures with exceptions in Python. For IDB1, I’ve had experience using Postman to test APIs, but not necessarily design one. I’ll also need to learn how to use RESTful APIs to collect data from sources for our models. I’ve used Heroku in the past to deploy web apps, but I’ll have to familiarize myself with AWS or GCP for this project. As for types, I never had a complete understanding of the different types in Python in my previous Python classes, so our lecture on types was very insightful especially in contrast with Java types.

What made you happy this week?

The weather was really nice in the evening last weekend, so my family and I had a movie night in our backyard. We watched both movies of National Treasure :) I also got to ride my electric scooter again since being in Austin. There aren’t many places you can reach in the suburbs by scooter, but I rode mine to drop off my updated voter registration in one of the blue collection boxes in my neighborhood. I loved the confused look on my neighbors faces when they saw me zipping by at 12mph :) And on that note, please make sure you’re registered to vote!!

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

I usually use LeetCode or HackerRank to prepare for technical interviews, but I was recently introduced to CodeSignal which is another platform for tackling coding challenges. I can get bored doing many challenges on the same platform, so it’s nice to add CodeSignal into the mix. Also, the UI for CodeSignal is very cute and engaging in my opinion.

That’s all for my blog post this week! Thanks for reading and please let me know how you relieve stress because ignoring all my responsibilities by watching ATLA in bed is not working too well at the moment.