What did you do this past week?

Although this was just the first week of school, it has been hard. Classes were alright, but the transition from work to school is hard. Add drop period was stressful, but everything worked out and I really enjoy going to all my classes now. I’ve heard a lot of “take a Downing class before you graduate”, so I expected a lot from OOP; but the class still exceededed my expectation. Walking into the class, I recognized a lot of familiar faces from 439 last semester, that already gave me some comfort knowing that we’ve all shared some pains together. The first lecture was basically syllabus plus hello world, but a very interesting hello world lecture. Dr. Downing went over a lot of syntax details in c++ and compared contrasted c++ syntax with java. Normally when I learn a new language, I try to make sense of it based on a language I already know, but I often miss the smaller differences. So I am glad that I finally get to learn them! One thing though, I wish the class is longer :p

What’s in your way?

I’ve looked into the Docker installation guide and expect it will take quite some time to set up. A lot of the tools Dr. Downing has introduced in the first class are new to me, so I am expecting those will also take some time to learn as well. Also, fall is the recruiting season, which means lots of interview prep to do, so managing my time between classes, projects, TA works and interview prep is crucial. I also need to be smarter about doing things, since it took me 2 hours to set up this blog.

What will you do next week?

I am going to set up Docker on my laptop, do the readings for this class, and get ready for the first project! I will try to talk to more people in this class and try to find a good partner for the later projects.

Tip of The Week

During work this summer, I learned about this natural language processing tool called LUIS. Some interns in my team used it to support their bots project, and I was introduced to it during their demo. LUIS has a prediction policy that if it’s below 90% confidence with categorizing the intent, it would put the sentence into an “undefined” bucket and ask you to clarify. It’s very good at identifying simple intents so the best way is to break a complex intent into multiple classifiers and go from there. It’s neat, I like it :)