Sound of my Heart
What did you do this past week?
This past week was really busy. After going to retreat with my church, I came back to school with this never-ending pressure to catch up with schoolwork. I ended up staying awake till 2AM Tuesday to complete Algo hw, which is was frustrating because the logic behind the problems were not too difficult, such as proving Dijkstra’s algorithm or how binary digits works, but building proofs to show matter-of-fact algorithms are correct are tedious. Not only are you required to write in standard notation, but you must provide an indefinite amount of observations so that a reader of a proof cannot be deterred in thinking a statement is an assumption.
On the bright side, I was able to do an interview with a UTCS professor, Vijay Chidambaram, on his background and research. From talking to him for only a brief moment, I knew how compassionate and understanding he was as a teacher and mentor, as well as his vast knowledge behind Operating Systems and facilitating research. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about his research in the future, and any other accomplishments he makes in the OS field.
CS-wise, I was able to work on the Netflix project with my partner, Nandhini, and we were able to get most of the project done by Thursday. The project is very similar to last semester’s Netflix project, except with the obvious language change, so I’m pretty sure we will be able to finish the project by the weekend’s end.
Non-CS wise, I changed the current idea I had for my Fiction writing story. Previously, I was going to write about a zombie-infected world with an artist, but now I’m going to try and write about a broken American world with tribal artists. Hopefully the idea will not die out, since I have to turn it in about 1 week later.
What’s in your way?
Memorizing. I love learning, but hard memorization on history really kills my mood. I find it really hard remembering facts unless it’s relevant to something I do. This is why I really enjoy working on projects or doing quizzes that test application of my knowledge rather than spitting out facts from my brain. I mean, I don’t mind reciting history behind some language’s changes in syntax, or the specifics behind concepts in algorithms, but my mind hurts when I have to answer what John Adams did for the Continental Congress or how Sam Houston took care of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. (this is all rants about to my Gov class)
SWE Class Impressions?
I enjoy SWE since functional programming in Python is way different than programming structured in Java or C++. I’ve found that the readings are really long, so they are hard to find time to do if I want to get a good night’s rest at the same time, but it’s really cool to hear how Python’s hashing deals with immutable and mutable objects and going on “tangent” topics over built-in functions and generators.
Changes in workflow are not hard to deal with as a proctor for OOP, since most changes are reflected between the classes, but I assume that it may be hard to follow being situated in only one class (SWE or OOP).
What will you do next week?
I plan to finish my short story, hopefully writing something that I can be satisfied, if not proud of, as well as clean up any Netflix project problems. Additionally, I will be going to the career fair for a bit so I can meet with specific companies and hopefully reinforce what I’m looking for in a company. Most of all, I will be grinding out time to memorize Texas Government so that I won’t fail the exam on Thursday.
Tip of the Week
Here are some interesting blog posts/articles to read: