CS 373 Fall 2020 — Daniel Gao
Blog #3
What did you do this past week?
This past week I was able to finish the Collatz assignment like I planned to. I also studied for and completed a couple of interviews for full-time positions. Other than that, I had a pretty light week and spent my free time watching Youtube, exercising, playing piano, and cooking.
What’s in your way?
As of right now, nothing is in my way. I am unstoppable.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will be helping out with the Citadel Code Your Career event on Tuesday by speaking about my experience over the summer. Besides that, I plan to work on some of the projects for my other classes, as I have an assignment for both neural networks and AI due next week. I also hopefully will have another couple of rounds of interviews to complete and hopefully, get closer to landing an offer.
What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)
The Collatz assignment felt pretty good, and I luckily didn’t have too much trouble completing it. I was reminded of some of the common practices used in software engineering by the whole process, and the project as a whole was quite fun. The makefile definitely was very useful to me when working on Collatz, as I never really had to search up how to run some of the programs we used like Black and Pylint — everything was contained in the makefile. It took me a while to figure out an optimization that would allow me to pass test case number 3 on Hackerrank without timing out, but I was eventually able to figure out an eager caching solution which worked quite well.
What made you happy this week?
This week I was able to spend some quality time with my family since I did not have too much in terms of work. Being able to take a break from school is always nice, and being able to spend it with family is even better.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I recently found this youtube channel going through quite a lot of very interesting and useful system design interview questions.