What did I do this past week?

I met up with my partner Eric several times and started on netflix. We spent quite some time at the beginning to understand the format and content of each file. Then we wrote scripts to generate the basic caches that Dr. Downing mentioned in class, and constructed the skeleton files for netflix. We haven’t looked into Boost serializaiton, but will probably do so some time today and decide if we want to use it. We have already written some unit tests and planned out the structure of our program. In this week’s class we had Chris Martin from Bloomberg talking about the company, the work experience and recruiting stuff. Outside of this class, I finished my algo homework and applied number theory homework. Applied number theory is pretty hard, but it’s a great class! I got to learn different encryption procedures and why they are difficult to decrypt. I also went home this weekend, home is the best :D

What’s in my way?

Algo homework, number theory homework, Japanese exam, career fair, interview prep… There a lot of things in my way. I haven’t prepared much for career fair yet, but hopefully everything will work out. I also need to learn how to use Boost serialization for this project.

What will I do next week?

I will finish all my work, prepare for interviews, go to career fair and finish the netflix project. I haven’t put too much thinking into generating good predictions yet, so that’s something to do as well :)

Tip of The Week

Microsoft’s new product, Skype Teams is a team messaging and collaboration application, basically a competitor to slack. I really like the UI, file sharing within teams and the project board features. The beta hasn’t been released yet, but I’m definitely looking forward to it! Here’s another article about it.

How I feel about the class

My group encoutered some problems with TravisCI since we moved to using GitHub Classroom for this project. The waiting time for the build is very long, so a student(George) suggested to test by forking the repo and test there. This approach is probably the best solution to the build problem. But that means we will develop on the forked repo (because it’s the only place we can test our code), which makes our dev branch unnecessary. And I think update to the GitHub Classroom repo will probably be done through pull requests. I am not sure if issues closed in the forked repo can transfer to the original repo, so issue tracking may be something we need to do twice. All these seem to be requiring a lot of work from the students, while the only advantage is that instructors don’t need to be invited to students’ repos. I am not sure how I feel about this GitHub Classroom change, but I do appreciate that this class is always trying out new things.