CS 373 Fall 2021: Blog 4

What did you do this past week?
This past week I completed the project on the first day of the week, Sunday. Other than that, I went to class and did homework and readings as usual. I did accidentally attempt to attend the class in real life on Wednesday because I did not pay enough attention to the Ed Discussion, but I still got to attend class that day online. I just attended class at the university on my laptop.

What’s in your way?
I need to work on homework for other classes in the coming weeks alongside the coming midterm in one of my classes. That midterm is coming after this upcoming week, but I should probably still prepare for it. Also, the shift toward going back to real life classes will surely make schedules more difficult for me since I have to commute to school each day.

What will you do next week?
I will be working hard to complete a project for a different class. Hopefully, the project will not be too difficult after I get it setup. Also, I will be going back to real life in one of my other classes.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #4: What Happens to Us?
This is the second time I have read this paper since I had Professor Downing over the summer, and the reading is still awful and relevant to today. I hope that corporations work towards preventing poor decisions in the workplace in order to foster a better work environment and not a sexually charged environment.

What was your experience of Collatz, exceptions, and types? (this question will vary, week to week)
I did the Collatz project in my previous course with Professor Downing, so it was quite easy for me to complete. Being able to recall all of the optimizations was fun though. Other than the difficulty of the project, I do think the experience was useful in sharpening my knowledge of writing code in Python.
Exceptions seemed mostly the same from my previous class with Professor Downing. However, the else clause that Python has for the try block seemed interesting. I did wonder what benefit it has over just putting code that a programmer wants in the body of the try block after the function that an exception can be raised. However, after doing some testing, I can see that try blocks in other functions that call functions with try blocks in themselves can use the else to show that the exception was fixed in an “inner” try block.
Types are interesting in Python. Python seems to put up more layers of abstraction for their data structures than other languages in order to make code run quicker while also creating more functionalities for these data structures.

What made you happy this week?
Nothing.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My music class has made me reflect on the technologies that we have today to make music. I never purchased a digital audio workstation to make music, but one time I did utilize the free software called Audacity to make something. It was not anything really special, but I thought it was simple to make a few notes into a long stretch of sound.
Website: https://www.audacityteam.org/