CS373 Fall 2020: Stephen Zheng

The following is for blog entry #6 for CS373.

What did you do this past week?

I worked on and finished phase 1 for the group project. For me, this included creating and completing the model pages with 3 instances each, writing a user story, satisfying our user stories, and creating a home page. I also attended lectures and took the daily quizzes.

What’s in your way?

We still have a lot to do, like getting information dynamically from the API and other things for phase 2.

What will you do next week?

I will probably work on getting information dynamically from our APIs and displaying information on the webpage. I will also attend classes and take the daily quizzes.

If you read it, what did you think of Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?

I was a bit surprised to see that this is still a serious issue in Silicon Valley. Personally, I have not encountered much sexism at UT, or in the CS department, so it is a bit unexpected to see how some people are treated elsewhere.

What was your experience of iterators, reduce(), and tuple? (this question will vary, week to week)

Iterators seem pretty similar to those in Java, although there are some key differences. I found the reduce function to be pretty interesting as I did not know it existed before this. Tuples seem pretty useful as a form of grouping small numbers of objects together.

What’s it like working in a group? (this question will vary, week to week)

Personally, I enjoyed working in a group, especially because I am with a group of friends. We got to help each other out with learning React since none of us really used it before. Working in a group made coding a bit more fun than working alone like usual.

What was your experience of the team contract? (this question will vary, week to week)

I think we followed our team contract pretty consistently. We didn’t have any glaring issues with our team coordination.

What was your experience of the peer review? (this question will vary, week to week)

Personally, I thought our group members all did what they were supposed to this week without any issues. So, for the peer review, I gave everyone near perfect scores.

What made you happy this week?

This week’s episode of The Boys came out and it was really good. Also, I’ve hopped on the Genshin Impact hype train and have been playing that game with my friends.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

If you happen to need to SSH into the lab machines and display a graphical window/UI (i.e. for Graphics), I recommend using MobaXterm, at least for Windows. It’s a very handy IDE with a good UI that lets you work on the lab machine about as comfortably as if it was on your own file system.