A SWEll Blog 4

Andrew Deng
3 min readSep 19, 2020

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What did you do this past week?

In addition to the weekly homework/projects/classes/studying/tutoring, I finished up a few coderviews, applied to a few more companies, and lazed around a bit too much. Oh, I also cooked a nice, juicy steak. That was pleasant. I also finally started working out again.

What’s in your way?

I’m feeling a little burned out and started to get unmotivated and slack off my schedule. I’m going to bed later and later (typing this at 4 am), so I need to whip myself back into shape.

What will you do next week?

I’ll go to the virtual career fair, take my Japanese and chemistry exams, work on the projects I have, continue my weekly shenanigans, really start to machine-gun those internship applications out, continue to work out and work towards bringing my sleep schedule closer to that of a normal, functioning human being.

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

I’ve been working with Python for a couple of years now, but I’ve only really used it for coding interview problems. As such, the concept of exceptions was entirely new to me. Types, on the other hand, I’ve already learned a little bit about. I knew how to generally use the different Python types, but I did glean some finer details about how they work in this week’s lectures.

For IDB1, it doesn’t seem that bad. I’ve done some really basic database stuff with Ruby on Rails, and I’ve built a site using React, Bootstrap, HTML, and CSS. For me, it seems like it’ll mostly just be a little brushing up on those skills and that’s the majority of the project.

What made you happy this week?

That steak… yum. I was also able to hop on the $1 year-long Masterclass subscription, and I’ve been binging those for the past 24 hours. Learning more about style from Tan France, cooking from Gordon Ramsay, and finally really elevating my piano improvisation skills with jazz from Herbie Hancock are things I’m really looking forward to.

Additionally, my nerdier side has this to say: PS5’s price is pretty good, I’ve been hyped up for “Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity” since it was announced last week (and now I’m really looking forward to 9/26 for some more Legend of Zelda news, hopefully regarding “Breath of the Wild’s” sequel), and “Final Fantasy XVI” was announced. So my wallet is losing about $500 to games before the end of the year, and I can’t wait.

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

As we’re all about to really get started on the collaborative projects and many of us will be pair programming, I highly recommend for everyone to download the VSCode extension, Live Share: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare

This extension basically converts VSCode into a programming version of Google Docs/Slides/Sheets. Multiple people can simultaneously contribute and make changes, which while helpful can cause a bit of chaos. Instead, the really useful function here would be the ability to keep up with other contributors as they’re coding. Live Share allows code viewers/contributors to automatically follow other contributors in the directory as they make changes. This bypasses the somewhat laggy nature of Zoom’s screen sharing.

It does take a little bit of finagling to get it to work, but it’ll be really worth the time.

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