1. What did you do this past week?

   This past week I went to my first two classes for software engineering! I also worked on the Collatz assignment. I haven’t gotten as far in it as I would like yet, but c’est la vie. Tonight I will do as much as I can then go from there. I struggled a fair amount with setting up the tools that we will be using this semester, but seem to have set them up correctly. I’m still working on getting familiar with them.

2. What’s in your way?

   Time commitments for other classes will make it difficult to work on Collatz before it is due.

3. What will you do next week?

   Next week I will read the textbook readings and start a lot earlier on the assignment. I’ll also review my notes before the quizzes. I expect I’ll be more familiar with the tools we’re using by then as well.

My experience in class:

I was initally overwhelmed in the first class because we started talking about topics I hadn’t heard about, like software development models and the list of important steps in software development. So far my experience has only been with smaller projects for classes, so I don’t have a great frame of reference for these things. Later on the content seemed more “on my level.” I appreciated that we talked about the assignment because I had nothing to go off of (I missed the first lecture). I’m not excited about the potential penalties I can earn for failing other peoples’ tests, but I understand why this grading policy exists. In the real world errors are more serious and should be avoided as much as possible. Other than the assignment we went over how classes and objects work in Python, which was interesting and useful. I think the examples showing how we should do unit tests and use coverage were useful as well.

Tip of the week:

If you use Chrome as your browser the extension Block & Focus can be helpful for ensuring productivity for a specified amount of time by blocking distracting websites and unblocking them when you’ve reached a break period.