What did you do this past week?

I spent most of my time finishing up CS/Math projects for other classes. I also built a mini side project to help maintain all the projects I’m working on with desktop shortcuts (effectively shortcuts for shortcuts).

What’s in your way?

Nothing, I’m this week was pretty relaxing so I think I’m ready to go for a busy week. It definitely feels like things are starting to settle down from what was a chaotic start of this semester.

What will you do next week?

For this class, I plan to meet my team, come up with a cool idea, and start work on the project.

What was your experience of exceptions, IDB1, and types?

I like the open-endedness of the IDB1 project and the fact that it makes us build essentially a real website that’s useful to people. With 2 weeks divided by ~5 people, I think the first deadline will be pretty do-able. It’s also convenient that it’s divided into checkpoints/phases although glancing at it, it could be the case that one phase undoes the work of a previous one. While not necessarily a bad thing, I think some careful planning ahead of time could avoid some of this.

I think the most interesting parts of types are the behaviors you don’t expect. The exercise in class reminds me of the repo about all the weird things that python does.

What made you happy this week?

I underestimated the value of cryptocurrency mining. I was under the impression that in 2020, you needed special hardware and scale to make a profit, but it turns out just running a miner in the background on my PC’s GPUs (+ fixed utilities at my apartment) means I make a passive ~$20 a week. That is effectively almost two free chicken shawarmas over rice per week.

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

Microsoft recently published an article on their experimental underwater datacenters called Project Natick. Surprisingly (at least to me), underwater data centers are more reliable, energy-efficient, and faster. I think it would be super cool if they expanded on this (assuming no ecological concerns).