SWEltering Schedules #6

Andrew Deng
3 min readOct 4, 2020

What did you do this past week?

Quite a bit. Moved back home to Dallas for the week, classes, homework, Phase I, more homework, more classes, labs, watched the presidential shouting match, etc.

What’s in your way?

A lack of motivation. I have designed my Austin room layout to be a productivity generating machine, but now I’m back in Dallas, where my room is my lazy place. So I have been slacking off a lot. I have now claimed the dining room table, so we’ll see if I can focus more this way.

What will you do next week?

Quite a bit more. Grinding LeetCode, coding my coderviews, prepping for my technical and behavioral interviews, figuring out Docker, Flask/Django, PostgreSQL, grinding chemistry, grinding Japanese, and hopefully getting back onto a sane person’s sleep schedule.

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

It was interesting. Some parts seemed like they could’ve been taken out of context, some parts really highlight a persisting problem in the tech industry. It is nice to see what big tech companies are doing to help improve the situation.

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

I have never found a use for iterators before (which is the intention of Python), I’ve never heard of reduce() before that lecture, and I’ve been pretty familiar with tuples for a while now.

What’s it like working in a group?

I like to work in groups. It keeps me motivated to actually get my stuff done, and despite not actually being randomly assigned by CATME, our group seems to work really well together. I’m especially proud of our frontend team: no experience with HTML/CSS and yet, they put out a really nice looking site that extended well beyond the scope of Phase I requirements. Us backend folks are gonna have our time to shine this upcoming week though ;)

What was your experience of the team contract?

It does seem a bit overkill, but I understand its necessity. Having worked on a team over the summer with no formal agreement had led to us being a bit too relaxed in the end when we all should’ve pushed each other more. Filling out this contract helped our group ask the uncomfortable questions to figure these things out ahead of time.

What was your experience of the peer review?

I’m a bit iffier on this one. From what I’ve seen, most teams are being split into frontend/backend teams, so I’m a bit hesitant to fill out the work/coding related portions for the fronted members, as I haven’t gotten a good chance to see how they work. It’s also difficult to recall how each member contributed to each meeting or in general sometimes.

What made you happy this week?

New Smash Bros. Fighter DLC announced. Steve from Minecraft is in the game, and his move-set looks incredible. He has very in-depth gameplay, and the way he’s set apart from the rest of the roster means there will be significant changes to how people play the game around him.

Also, living with my family again is a plus (most of the time).

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

If you have not yet, do it now! If you’re not in Austin and are registered for Austin, vote by mail. If you’re not registered for Austin and will be in Austin, vote by mail. Early voting is also starting soon, do that if you must. Just do it.

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