What did you do this past week?

This week was the first normal week of classes! Overall, I feel about ‘medium’ on my progress level. I kept up with the readings for OOP and felt prepared for our quizzes, but as far as progress goes on the assignment, I feel a bit meh. I’m not behind and I’m not in panic mode by any means, but I’m not as far as I wanted to be by today.

I typically don’t procrastinate but I got sick at the beginning of this week and got set back some due to being fatigued when I got home. Thankfully though, I made some progress with setup due to the really helpful overview we had in class on Wednesday for the steps we need to take to get up and running.

I’m thrilled about going over try catch exceptions in class on Friday. I haven’t used these much but they seem incredibly useful for testing purposes and for an issue I’ve been struggling with at work. I appreciated going over different ways to cache information in our programs on Monday. In general, the way we approach learning about programming or design decisions in class is appealing me. Professor Downing has a way of categorizing ideas, such as ‘these are kinds of caches which exist’ or ‘here are ways that functions can communicate with each other’ that really sticks with me.

What’s in your way?

Learning new things quickly and not getting intimidated by what I don’t know or haven’t used. For instance, Docker, Travis CI, C++, gaps in my knowledge about ‘make’. Occassionally I will get frustrated when I struggle with learning something but I think staying calm with these new experiences and just soaking it all in will allow me to learn more from them and prepare me more for difficult situations in the future. :)

A specific issue currently is efficiently tracking down errors in my make file and learning to work with Docker.

What will you do next week?

I want to wrap up on the project by Wednesday to give me time to review it and make sure I have the files as they should be. This coming weekend I would like to start on the next project to avoid procrastinating.

Tip of the Week

Here is channel I enjoy watching on YouTube on computer science related topics, called Computerfile. https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile/videos In particular I enjoy watching the graphics videos or the ones covering algorithms.