Week 11: 4 Nov – 10 Nov

What did you do this past week?

This past week I attended HackTX, took an Algorithms exam, and hosted my final two events for WiCS. I also spent a lot of time working on phase 3 of the SWE project and we managed to finish everything on time. This phase went a lot more smoothly than phase 2 though there were definitely still several technical bumps we hit while trying to get searching and highlighting to work. I also went to my very first football game (ever!) and it was a great choice to go to it; it was tied in the fourth quarter and UT won by a kick made in the last three seconds of the game!

What’s in your way?

I have hit that point in the semester where I’m in a slump and it’s difficult to find the motivation to study and work on assignments to the best of my ability. Hopefully, I can rejuvenate and find the motivation I desperately need since my grades are reflecting how much effort I’ve been putting into my courses this semester (they’re slipping rapidly).

What will you do next week?

This coming week will be the same as most weeks: I will be working on homework. This week, I have a Computer Networks lab to do. I also have daily quizzes in my Software Engineering and Algorithms courses that I have been taking since the beginning of the semester that I will definitely be continuing to do this coming week. Hopefully, I’ll work on some extra credit assignments in some of my classes so I can recover from some sobering grades I’ve recently received.

What was your experience of refactoring?

I personally did not find much purpose in the refactoring lectures. Frankly, I think that some of the refactoring solutions presented to us were redundant and unnecessary and less clean than the supposedly “unrefactored” code that we were told to refactor. However, I myself am a proclaimed “messy programmer” and I admit that all code that I write will always need serious refactoring before it can be submitted and/or passed on to someone else to look over so getting into the habit of learning what clean code can potentially look like is definitely beneficial to me.

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

All college students at accredited universities are eligible to create a JetBrains student account and get free access (free license) to all of the JetBrains desktop IDEs. I personally use IntelliJ most heavily, but I have also downloaded many of their others ones including PyCharm, CLion, and WebStorm. They are all really great IDEs for programming and they offer many products for all kinds of development.