What did you do this past week?
This past week I spent a majority of my time working on this class and planning group schedules for my computer ethics class. Outside of class related work, I’ve been spending a majority of my time keeping up with baseball and all of the excitement that’s going on with the current season.
What’s in your way?
Besides the usual work for this class, I have a busy schedule coming up with the final project for my computer ethics course. My group for the class mapped out our expected work and deadlines leading up to the due date for next week and there is a lot that needs to be done.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I am probably going to spend a majority of my time working on that project. If we are assigned a new project for this class soon, I want to get an early start on that as well so I am more relaxed when the deadline approaches. Besides that, I want to start helping prepare dinner for my family again. With summer classes, I have been really busy these past few weeks and have been unable to find the time late at night. Now that I am feeling a bit more situated, I hope that I can work out my schedule and find a way to do so again.
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #4: Twice as Good?
While it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before, I really enjoyed reading this week’s article. I am currently taking the UT CS ethics course alongside this one and it was interesting to come across this topic in this class. While my current professor made a point to discuss implicit biases and how it could affect technology and the industry, the article’s claim that industry diversity would not be covered in most CS ethics courses has held consistent with what I have seen so far. When we discussed implicit biases in my current class, it was more so in the context of how things like facial recognition software could fall victim to the same shortcomings that humans can, not how it would play out in the industry population. I am enjoying the class so far, but that was particularly interesting.
What was your experience of exceptions, consts, algorithms, and iterators?
I enjoyed the lecture topic for this week. I feel like I have a deeper understanding of the “const” keyword and its use in C++ than I have before and the explanation of using “what const is closer to in the code” was particularly useful in making it more intuitive to use and understand.
What made you happy this week?
The Astros have been on fire lately and regaining the division lead over Oakland has been wonderful. Besides that, I still cannot believe that Shohei Ohtani is doing the things he is doing at the moment. He has been so good so far this season and his recent stretch of games has me looking forward to his highlights every evening because it seems like he is incapable of having an off day as of recent times.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I am not sure how useful this will be for most people, but I typically do not begin writing code for an assignment until I sit down and draw what I think the problem and potential solution will look like. I find that abstracting the issue into physical representations and models helps me think more clearly even if the solution seems simple. With this approach, I have occasionally come across minor implementation issues that I would not have encountered until much too late had I gone ahead and began writing code.
