1. What did you do this past week?
   I didn’t do much for this class last week. Ideally I would’ve worked on the next stage of the IDB project, but other homework got in the way of that.

2. What’s in your way?
   A lack of time. This week is a little chaotic for me cause we need to finish the IDB project and I’ll have to work on the last PintOS project because my OS group won’t be able to meet much after this week.

3. What will you do next week?
   This upcoming week I will work on finishing the IDB project. Hopefully it won’t take too long. So far we’ve written user stories and talked about we need to do.

My experience in the class:
Last week we finished talking about databases and moved on to start talking about refactoring. I’m interested in big data, so I enjoy learning about databases. Refactoring is also a pretty important thing in CS, so I’m glad we’re learning about it. When coding, I find that I focus on solving the problem first without regard to beauty or efficiency of code. After all, functionality is the end goal. The issue with this approach though is that I often won’t go back and fix things, so I end up with code that isn’t as good as it could be. It’s worth putting in the extra effort along the way to improve the code instead of leaving it all til the end.

On an unrelated note it’s surprising that the semester is almost over! I’m definitely going to appreciate the winter break. I need to sleep for a couple weeks straight.

Tip of the week:
Here is a website where you can practice querying a database. It doesn’t list the models, which makes it a little cumbersome to work with, but it’s a good way to test out what we’ve learned in class.

When to refactor

Laugh of the week: Rescuing a princess using various programming languages