What did you do this past week?
This past week on the project, I cleaned up our front end and helped do some data collection for the back end. Unfortunately, I was unable to start studying for the upcoming exam, but I am planning on starting today.
What’s in your way?
This upcoming week is going to be the worst week of this semester. I have three exams, two projects due, and I’m organizing a hackathon that is happening on Saturday, October 17. I was prepping for this week by working on the projects as soon as they were released and studying for my exams fairly early. Hopefully, I will get through this week so I can go back to a normal schedule.
What will you do next week?
This next week I will be studying for the exam and start implementing the connection to the back end on the front end. I will also be enhancing the front end with graphs and images on our model pages.
If you read it, what did you think of The Open-Closed Principle?
I thought that this was a pretty good read. The Open-Closed Principle explains the use of abstraction and how your implementation of classes should allow users to not modify but only extend with functions. This principle is all about future planning, where new users should not have to deal with changing anything in your code. Instead, these users can focus on creating their own functions that utilize the classes or functions that previous users have created.
What was your experience of iterators, generators, and yield? (this question will vary, week to week)
I actually learned a lot about iterators, generators, and yield this week. I sometimes use iterators when I code in C++, but the lectures on iterators and generators in Python opened me up to really see what they are doing. I find it interesting that generators are lazy iterators that only compute the values as you use it. Yield seems to be an application of iterators on functions and though I do not completely understand what application this can be used in, it is something I will keep a note of.
What made you happy this week?
This week was pretty exciting! Although I was pretty overwhelmed with this upcoming week, I had amazing news from two companies with full-time offers for me! This definitely relieved some stress from me so I don’t have to be worried about being jobless after I graduate. It also took some pressure off of the next interviews I have since I know I have something to turn to if I do not get offers from the places I am currently interviewing for.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Start studying for exams early! Even if you do not have three exams in one week as I do, it has always been beneficial for me to start studying for my exams at least a week before they occur. A phenomenon in psychology called the Forgetting Curve states that we retain more information if we study it for a longer period of time. This curve was created from Ebbinghaus, who conducted this experiment on himself. He tried to memorize a list of nonsense words and calculated the percent retained over a course of days. He found that if you review only once you will retain less than if you review over a longer period of time. Although you may remember almost everything if you study the night before, I find it less stressful when you study early enough to not be stressed the day before an exam.
Thank you for reading and I hope you have a good day!
