Week 2: 9 Sep – 15 Sep

What did you do this past week?

This past week, the reality of school and the next few months of my life finally showed its face. All of my courses released their first assignments and projects so I spent a lot of time working on those. I worked on some of the workflow for the Collatz project as well as getting the brute force solution on HackerRank, however I unfortunately did not get as much done as I had hoped. As one of the WiCS corporate officers, I am responsible for coordinating with our organization’s sponsors as well as FoCS companies that want to host a free event with our student organization. I spent several hours every day corresponding with various companies, the department, and other WiCS officers regarding events and the sponsorships. Most companies are reaching out now as recruiting season is in full swing at this point. On that note, I also spent some time working on applying to companies and completing coding challenges.

What’s in your way?

I mentioned last week that my weakness is time management (which was what was in my way for a lot of the tasks I had needed to complete). After some introspection, I can see that what is in my way now is balancing and prioritizing things. There are things to be done in a day and some take precedence over others – for instance, assignments due that day are of more importance to finish in that moment over assignments due in a week. Furthermore, I spent unnecessary amounts of time checking and refreshing my email instead of taking that time to read up on how to fix the bug in my Collatz project. Ultimately, I need to work on setting myself on a path to success rather than assigning myself to the easiest thing I could do and lazily neglect the more important things.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will finish the Collatz project as well as my other courses’ assignments and homework. I have a few recruiting deadlines coming up this week that I will be doing and I will also be attending the career fair as well as the career brunch on Thursday. Thus, next week will be one of the busiest weeks for me in the entire semester, and I hope I’m prepared for it!

What was your experience in learning about unit tests, coverage, exceptions, and types?

I enjoyed learning about all of these. I think it’s definitely important when developing robust code that needs to be vetted through and through especially when working in an enterprise setting. I believe that it’s very applicable for future projects and future jobs as well so it was helpful to learn about them in this class.

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

For Mac or Linux users, Homebrew is a great tool to install in the terminal. It’s a package management tool that makes installing software onto your computer simpler and more straightforward. For instance, when I needed to install a newer version of Python on my computer, all I needed to do was run a command on the terminal:

brew install python3

It’s a very neat tool that makes installing and managing software much easier.