What did you do this past week?

This past week, I spent a good amount of time catching up on school work. With Spring Break finally over, I found that there was a lot of stuff that I had not finished. I spent about 8 hours working on my algo hw the day before it was due, which was not the best idea since my partner and I stayed up till 5am raging over it. Afterwards, I found that I was still stuck in the Spring Break vibes, so it was really hard to focus on hw and manage my time well.

For SWE, our team managed to finish the website right before it was due. I was really surprised that we completed the project, since most of us was busy over the break, and not much of the project details were clearly laid out in the beginning. Fortunately, through much slack talk, separate meetings, and a handful of sessions working on front-end, back-end, and database, I’m proud of our finished product. Looking forward to Phase 2!

Outside of schoolwork, Freetail Hackers, the org I joined recently, started a game of Assassins amongst everyone in the group. The result of that was a whole bunch of paranoia over who my assassin is, as well as a lot of Facebook stalking and discussion over the schedule my target follows. These past few days have been pretty rough because I can’t trust anyone, so hopefully, I can be at ease by either being assassinated by my assassin, or win the game by assassinating everyone.

What’s in your way?

I have 2 exams next week, Algo and Gov, which requires a lot of time commitment. Additionally, this weekend does not look too free, so I will need to do my best to study as much material as I can in the next few days, else I will fall behind and subsequently fail my exams.

Also, for our back-end on our website, we’re not completely sure what type of sort functionality we want to take on for our database. We initially looked into ElasticSearch to provide our search, sort, and filter attributes, but it looks like we’ll be spinning up another instance to represent our database, and we’ll need to spend about 200+ dollars a month to maintain it, so that’s out of the question. Hopefully we figure out our tasks pretty quickly for this next project, such as set up Angular and prepare good processing of requests by our API, so that we can rest well at night not having to worry about the absurd amount of problems that can arise from our project not working or being completed.

SWE Impressions?

Lately, we’ve started to go into SQL methods. This topic, in itself, has really intrigued me, since I do not typically get the chance to work with databases. I’m really looking forward to what we’ll learn to implement with it in Python, especially since these skills will be very applicable for future careers in software development.

What will you do next week?

I will be preparing for my exams, and hopefully getting enough rest. I hope to further heighten my focus on my work and have a mind that is not centered around distractions and unrelated tasks until I complete most of my tasks. Hopefully for SWE, we’ll get the tasks down so that we can finish the project ASAP, and I hope to finish my short story for my fiction writing class so I don’t have to spend a sleepless night forcefully writing a creative story in less than 7 hours, because I did that last time, and it was not fun.

Tip of the Week

Recently, I have gotten into reading Medium articles, and I’ve found it to be quite the run of my money. Though I don’t pay for the service, I have found myself being exposed to many ongoing topics around the world (whether relevant to my life or not). I highly suggest that if you have time, to read into the thoughts and ideas other people have on the Medium, because it’s really amazing to hear what people go through in all countries, and provides insight to a wider scope of problems and ways people handle challenges in life.