Week 4
What did you do this past week?
Besides regularly scheduled assignments, this past week featured lots of office hours. Students are midway through possibly the most challenging assignment in Operating Systems, so office hours were packed this week. While fun, being a human debugger is also kind of tiring when you do it for three hours…
What’s in your way?
I don’t have much in my way, although I’m a bit anxious about group projects for this course. Not being able to choose group members means I’m not really sure what to expect, and whether it’ll be a good or bad experience.
What will you do next week?
Next week is rather busy, since I have an exam and 3 assignments due in the middle of the week. After that I’ll be able to give myself a bit of a break, by which I mean procrastinate on the following week’s assignments.
If you read it, what did you think of What Happens to Us?
This wasn’t really shocking to me, since I’ve read the same or similar articles before, including from when I took object-oriented programming last semester. I definitely agree that the community has a huge issue with being open and welcoming to women and minorities, though I would like to think it has been improving over time. Further change, as listed in the actions suggested in the paper, is definitely still needed to promote an ideal fair and inclusive space.
What was your experience of Collatz, exceptions, and types?
Exceptions were pretty familiar, since they work nearly the same in Python as they do in C++. If you want to get to know some different ways of dealing with exceptions, I hear Lisp has an interesting system, although I only know it on a surface level.
Python types, on the other hand, irritate me. If you want consistent, sensible typing, just use Haskell and get to know how its type inference works. The beauty of having strict static typing is that the compiler will catch most logic errors for you as well — 90% of the time, if the code compiles, it works. I guess that’s part of the motivation for Mypy as well (static typing is just clearly superior and dynamic typing should never be used unless you want to abuse it, and I mean this as a joke and dynamic typing absolutely has merits, but it’s not like the joke isn’t rooted in some reality that static typing is just better). Other than that, yep. Types. Love them, especially when they can’t change on you in the middle of execution.
What made you happy this week?
I spent two hours cooking pork belly and it was very much worth the three meals I got out of it. In my free time (read: while procrastinating on work), I also finished a few slow speedruns of Hollow Knight, which I’ve wanted to do for quite a while, so I’m very proud of that personal achievement.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
setwithfriends.com is a wonderful website created by someone I know. Set is fun to open up sometimes and tire out my brain for a while, and if you so desire, you can with others as well. Highly recommend.
