Pre-Exam Life
What did you do this past week?
Over the weekend, I got to attend Earthack and created a project called Pick It Up. It was a pretty cool project because it combined computer vision and gaming in order to crowdsource cleanup, which basically allows people to collaborate over cleaning up litter in the area. This project was really fun, because it was my first time that I worked on Node.js, which I originally hated, but ended up enjoying, and I wrote a post about being more open to learning stuff that I was closed off to here. The Earthack brought a lot of thoughts and questions for me, such as my intentions and the formats of hackathons, which I’m hoping to write about sometime in a future blog post, but for now, looks like I probably won’t pursue after it until I am more free.
Besides that, this week has been pretty nice and chill. I was able to cook for my church group, Exalt, making baked veggies and spiced chicken. I haven’t had much time these past several weeks in order to cook my own dishes, so I’m hoping that as these exams are coming, I’ll be able to have more tasty dishes than Chik-fil-a and Pizza Rolls.
Additionally, this Friday, we had a night to celebrate the graduates of 2017 for our church. For our Sophomore class, Empire, we recorded a meta video of us trying to figure out and prepare for our video itself. At a certain point of the video, we had it where the video would “manually trigger” code that sent out all the graduates emails of why we were blessed by them. Using Gmail’s API in Python, I coded up a program that created and sent a message to the graduates when running a python v2 script, which can be found here.
What’s in your way?
Studying for my exams. I have to study for SWE, and I’ve forgotten a lot about decorators as well as how to make SQL calls. Additionally, I have a Gov exam on the same day as the SWE exam, and I probably won’t start prepping for Gov until Tuesday. Fortunately, I will be able to spend time this weekend studying.
SWE Impressions?
The Visitor pattern has been probably one of the most intriguing patterns that I’ve learned. I thought I was done with Cons after taking CS314 Data Structures, but having to reapply Lisp concepts reminded me of the recursive data structure’s wide usage before many languages became popular.
The presentations have been good, though I feel like the specifications for presentations are not clearly clarified, so even though students have a lot of flexibility in order to share their work this semester, many presenters spend a lot of time presenting certain aspects, or not covering everything that I believe is important, such as the functionality of search, design process, as well as team communication.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will start creating my cheat sheet for SWE and studying for my Gov exam. If I have time, I may try to explore Twilio in order to configure an application that can run a game of Assassins for other people. I played Assassins with my friends in my org, Freetail Hackers as well as administrated it for my church group. I would like to create a better interface, both to help the administrator delegate rules and make announcements, as well as allow players to be able to be added to the game, confirm assassinations made, as well as do tiny things such as communicate questions or report feedback.
Additionally, I will be making my final blog post for my blogging position! I’ve really enjoyed blogging, and it has really helped me in structuring and presenting my thoughts better, as well as pushing me to read and write more. Hoping to make more intellectual and interesting blog posts that people can read it to learn, extract ideas, or enjoy.
Tip of the Week
Many interesting things happening all around the world: