CS373 Spring 2020: Rithvik Saravanan — Blog Post #7
What did you do this past week?
This past week, I got started on Phase 2. My team has been busy with exams and other classes’ work, so we did not meet up yet. However, we plan on working on some parts separately until we all have some time to get together. I personally started looking into how we will incorporate the database into our project to retrieve the instances for each model. I plan to use AWS RDS and Flask to provide the JSON instances to our models. I have a general idea of how the process works, so I just need to get started on the development portion when my exams are over.
What’s in your way?
I have a very tight schedule this week with several exams spread out throughout the course of the week. Additionally, I have two other projects for other classes that I need to get done by the end of the week. Between studying for my exams and working on the other projects, I will have to make some time to get a little bit done for this phase of the project.
What will you do next week?
Next week, we have Spring Break, so I plan on getting a majority of this phase’s work done. Since I’ll have a bit more time, I hope to make significant progress on this phase in order to have everything ready to be submitted when we get back after the break.
What was your experience of =, *, **, and decorators? (this question will vary, week to week)
I have had a little exposure to the =, *, and ** operators in Python before, so I found this week to be a good review of these topics. I also learned a lot more about the specific, nitpicky details of unpacking and its uses. However, I had never used decorators before this, so this lesson provided me with a good opportunity to learn about how to use them in Python. I acknowledge that they can be very helpful in practical cases (i.e. when you need to have multiple different types of annotations for a function).
What made you happy this week?
I got to go to the gym and play basketball again this week. Doing so helps take my mind off of the impending assignments that I need to complete and the exams that I need to study for.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
If you are learning a new (software) language and you come across something that you are unfamiliar with when reading or writing code, I would recommend looking it up and learning why it does what it does. As I’ve been learning some new languages, this strategy has helped me the most because it sticks a little bit better in my mind. This way, when I encounter something similar in the future, I am able to apply what I already learned instead of searching it up again.
