CS373 Fall 2020: Jonathan Randall

Howdy, y’all! Welcome to week 3.

What did you do this past week?

I was really glad to have Labor Day off. The extra weekend day was helpful, although not too productive. Still, I managed to get some work done. I finished up a few assignments. I’m still concerned with my workload being too high for this semester, and the transition from the light, carefree “syllabus season” into the dark, ominous “first midterm season” is never easy.

I went to a meeting with one of my professors, and I was expecting a lot of people to have questions, but no one did. We ended up talking about math and it ended up getting sort of philosophical. He seems to know what he’s doing!

I’m working as an SI leader for CS 314 this semester, which has been challenging but interesting. The first week, turnout was fairly low. This week, however, I had around 30 students show up. I was unsure if I would be able to manage to teach such a large group, but luckily it worked out!

I also received some good feedback, and a few people said they found the SI session helpful. One person said they were going to come next week! I think I’ve always enjoyed teaching and tutoring others, but the feeling of helping people understand difficult concepts is surprisingly rewarding.

What’s in your way?

I have yet to become fast at formatting in LaTex, which multiple classes require of me. It’s sort of crazy to be able to finish a homework assignment in an hour but then to spend the next few hours just looking up LaTex commands to make the answers look acceptable. I wish I could be as powerful with LaTex as I know in my heart I can be.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I have to finish up an assignment for a class that will require me to make a neural network for a specific problem. I toyed around with multi-layer perceptrons in the past, but applying them to a problem will probably be a challenge.

What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)

This week, I didn’t touch Collatz too much. I had passed the Hackerrank tests after already implementing a metacache successfully. Now, all I have to do is format and finish up the last few steps. Hopefully, it won’t take too long.

What made you happy this week?

I made tacos al pastor at home. They were pretty delicious and my recipe will only get more refined and more delicious.

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

My tip-of-the-week is related to how I use Sublime, a fairly popular text editor. You can actually open up an entire folder at once by dragging and dropping into the window. This has made my workflow more efficient. I used this feature during the debugging phase of Collatz and it helped a ton.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to another amazing week!