CS373 Fall 2020: Jonathan Randall
Howdy, y’all! Welcome, welcome, welcome, to my Blog: Week of 16 Nov — 22 Nov.
What did you do this past week?
This past week was a blur! For this class, I worked on adding visualizations for the final phase of our project, as well as refactoring. I had a lot of fun experimenting with different libraries and React components and with D3. In terms of refactoring, there was a good amount of work to do, but we worked very hard in earlier phases to reduce our workload later down the road.
For my data science class, I put together a final project report. My goal is to build upon previous work to perform latent trajectory prediction on sequential data using VAEs. Essentially, the goal is to train a model using sequential data from some system with underlying dynamics (like second-order ODEs) and be able to reconstruct and predict future states using those dynamics. I want to see if I can make a model with not-so-blurry predictions using a GAN to change the reconstruction error from pixel-wise to some learned error function.
What’s in your way?
My biggest obstacle will be summoning the morale to finish this semester smoothly. I feel very fatigued and most of my classes feel somewhat repetitive at this point. I hope that next semester will feel like a “refresh” instead of a continuation.
What will you do next week?
Next week is Thanksgiving. I drove home already and will be staying with my immediate family. I don’t really know what I’m going to do during my free time. Maybe I will travel to Ikea and buy some of their horse meatballs.
If you read it, what did you think of What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You?
I have not read it.
What was your experience of refactoring? (this question will vary, week to week)
I thought the refactoring examples in class were fun; I enjoyed the video rental store concept. With some of the refactoring, like extracting methods in odd classes to the more logical place, it seemed obvious to me. The refactoring example on Friday was more difficult because we used separate classes to define price, which was less intuitive.
What made you happy this week?
This week, my roommate took care of his friend’s dog. It was a huge and friendly husky and it really made me want to adopt or foster a dog. I’ve been browsing Austin Pets Alive but I feel like at this point it’s window-shopping. Maybe I’ll get myself a doggie over winter break, that might be fun.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week would not be using a text editor for everything. My project team shamed me for using Atom for writing my Typescript code, which I agree lacks a lot of features that proper IDEs and such have.
Even though I probably won’t switch over to some tool like Visual Studio Code during this class, I think that I will become familiar with it over winter break.
My other tip would be Recharts. It was really simple to customize and create cool charts and visualizations for our data. I especially enjoyed using the Tooltip component to add some interactivity to our charts.
