What did you do this past week?⌗

This week my team finished Phase II of the project and are likely to start Phase III very soon.

What’s in your way?⌗

I have lots of work assigned by other classes and a second wave of midterms is on the way.

What will you do next week?⌗

Plan and work on Phase III and other projects.

If you read it, what did you think of Ethical CS?⌗

I only had time to skim it, but plan to go through it in more detail when I get a chance. It’s both interesting and incredibly applicable. I’ve been wanting to take CS349: Contemporary Issues in Computer Science for a while now but it’s always been full before I got a chance to register.

I’ll also plug AI Global which is a non-profit currently looking for CS interns with an SWE background to work on responsible AI.

What was your experience of functions, lambdas, and decorators?⌗

I really like Python’s ability and choice of positional and keyword arguments, but after some of the examples, we went through in class and saw on the quiz it’s clear that they can be abused to make for some really confusing code. I think it’s also interesting that **kwargs and *args become dictionaries and tuples respectively rather than a special ArgumentContainer thing.

Lambda’s closure semantics, although it sort of makes sense why, really surprised me. So many other things are pass-by-reference, it’s very weird to see the output of a function defined before time change due to a variable assignment after.

Decorators are a great feature that does something very simple while still saving the many lines of code it would require to do the same thing without them. There was also a lot of debate on what syntax they should take in Python so it’s interesting to see the other proposals for how they could have been.

What made you happy this week?⌗

I took a break from work this week and made some home-made Halal Bros at it tasted almost like the real thing.

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

I found this online book called High Performance Browser Networking. It basically goes over how the internet works, the history of why it was built like that, and how to take advantage of its different features when building an application. It also has some great diagrams and is really easy to follow for people without a networking background.