CS373 Fall 2020: Week 7 Anshuman Kumar

The blog entry must explicitly answer the following questions about the class (mark the questions bold in your post):

1. What did you do this past week?
   This past week I took my Personal finance midterm. I also spent some time working on my Natural Language Processing projects, but mostly just enjoyed the easier than usual week.
2. What’s in your way?
   I’m still having issues with AWS Amplify for the IDB project, and how it won’t recognize my build artifacts successfully. I plan on talking to the TAs to see if they can help me, as my own research has found nothing similar to what is going on — nothing that can solve my issues, at least.
3. What will you do next week?
   Next week I’ll be finishing up my NLP project, studying for 3 midterms, and getting phase 2 of IDB done. I’m half done with the coding portions of the NLP project, but there’s still a decent chunk of work to be done for the writeup. The succession of midterms will be pretty brutal too, with all of them on either Wednesday or Thursday. After those finish though, I’ll be able to take a short break before tackling IDB with my team, as that is due the following Monday.
4. If you read it, what did you think of The Open-Closed Principle?
   I think that the Open-Closed principle is a pretty limiting way of doing programming work. It certainly has its strengths, especially in ensuring reliability, but it is so rigid that I think that functionality might be sacrificed in the pursuit of this principle — at least if it is always the goal. When used logically, however, it can be worth using.
5. What was your experience of iterators, generators, and yield? (this question will vary, week to week)
   I don’t really like how Python implements iterators — the decision to handle running out of values by throwing an exception seems exceptionally clunky to me. However, it is certainly interesting that calling iter() on an iterator will return itself, and I can think of how that would simplify checking types. I do like generators, though. It’s pretty neat to use generators to calculate ranges and the like on the fly, instead of holding a precomputed list in storage.
6. What made you happy this week?
   I went out to go explore around the Walnut Creek Park this last week, and it was really refreshing to go out and explore in nature, even if the park was still surrounded by the city.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
   Definitely go out and leave your apartments/dorms. There are plenty of places to go without having to worry too much about getting COVID, and a change in scenery will really help your mental state. Every week can feel the same with all online classes, so something new is nice.