CS 373 Fall 2020: Samantha Tuapen

Welcome to my twelfth blog post for CS373: Software Engineering

What did you do this past week?

I finished building the Visualizations page for our site. I’ve been working with Python in the backend for the past 2 phases now, so it’s refreshing to get to work on something new this phase.

What’s in your way?

Currently, nothing is in my way :)

What will you do next week?

I will help finish preparing the structure of our presentation so we could hopefully record it before we leave for break! My group and I hope to get all our presentation deliverables completed before next Wednesday so when we get back from break, we can just focus on preparing for finals.

What did you think of What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You?

I found it just as insightful and shocking as the article we read earlier in the semester called Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? I’m thankful that there are brave women, named and anonymous, that are willing to share their stories in hopes of creating more awareness and conversation around this appalling topic. Just because you personally don’t experience degradation in the workplace doesn’t mean it’s not happening. By holding ourselves and our colleagues accountable for our actions, we can instigate a culture of better respect and diversity.

What was your experience of refactoring?

I’ve been told to always look out for ways to optimize and refactor my code ever since I began university courses, but I never had formal lectures that walked me through different ways to do just that. All the strategy pattern exercises we did in class throughout this week were intuitive and great practice for spotting and implementing ways to to make code more modular, reusable, and readable.

What made you happy this week?

I’ve been getting about 9 hours of sleep every night this past week! Though I don’t think my body is quite used to getting so much rest because some days I wake up with a bad headache…is it possible to get headaches from sleeping too much?

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

If you’re having trouble using D3.js to build the visualizations for your site, consider looking for existing React components online that use D3 under the hood. One of our classmates, Jeff Ye, shared a very helpful resource on our class piazza called Recharts and I personally used this source for creating the bubble charts that are on our site!

Thanks for reading my blog post this week and I hope you have a relaxing and food-coma-inducing Thanksgiving :)