What did you do this past week?

I finished the project with my team. The main task I completed last week was the dynamic GitLab stats on the about page as well as some miscellaneous UI work.

What’s in your way?

The midterm grind has paused for a bit, so I think I’ll just be working on ramping up Phase II and starting recently assigned projects and homework for other classes.

What will you do next week?

Phase II seems to be much larger than Phase I, so I will probably start working on that early next week.

If you read it, what did you think of Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?

I feel like these kinds of sexist actions are likely encouraged by a company’s culture and that companies that have a culture that tolerates them should be called out.

What was your experience of iterators, reduce(), and tuple?

I had no idea that iter(iter(a)) was the same as iter(a) and that iter(...) of an iterator is just a copy of itself. It’s weird but it does kind of make sense. reduce() is interesting as such a simple function can represent so many different operations. I recently learned about MapReduce which takes it to a new level. Tuple is odd because it has pretty much a subset of the features of a list with the same complexities. In practice, one could just always use a list and get away with it most of the time, although tuple’s immutability and hash-ability do give it some extra functionality.

What’s it like working in a group?

In my experience, there are groups that make things take longer (compared to doing a task solo) and groups that make it considerably faster. Fortunately, my project group is the latter.

What was your experience of the team contract?

I think it was good to set expectations and was easy to work through with my team but I’m not sure the contract would have helped a team that was already dysfunctional.

What was your experience of the peer review?

My team was great to work with and made the peer review easy to fill out.

What made you happy this week?

I had time to integrate the Google Smart Home API into my custom home automation server and so I can now control everything directly from my lock screen or with Google Assistant. It saves only about a second off of doing things like turning off the lights, but it looks super cool.

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

Since we’re using SQL in Phase II of the project, my pick-of-the-week is pgAdmin. It’s a dashboard and editor that turns your database into basically an editable spreadsheet. It’s been super helpful for tweaking and debugging databases in previous projects.