CS373 Spring 2021: Jack Raney (Week 2)
3 min readFeb 1, 2021
- What did you do this past week? : This week, I made a lot of progress on a project in my Computer Networks class. I’m developing a client application in python using threads to manage input and networking at the same time. I’m on track to finish this project much sooner than expected which will give me much more free time to work on our first project in SWE!
- What’s in your way? : Right now I feel like I’m in a good position to complete everything I need. I’m still working on organizing my semester and getting an idea of what needs to be done each week for each class. So, I’m struggling a bit at the moment with keeping track of everything, but that will remedy itself quickly.
- What will you do next week? : On Monday I will begin working on the first lab. I don’t feel particularly overwhelmed by the scope of the project, I feel like it should go pretty smoothly. I plan to work on it pretty consistently every day of the week if not every other day. Additionally, I plan to finish my client application for my Networks class on Monday and will spend a night or two getting the server side to work.
- If you read it, what did you think of the makefile? : The makefile was a bit confusing to me. I’m not super experienced with reading makefiles, so a lot of the format was new to me, but I understand the gist of it.
- What was your experience of Docker? : Docker sounds really cool. Its new to me, but I plan on using it for the first project for sure!
- What was your experience of assertions? : The lecture on assertions was really useful to me. I particularly thought it was helpful being told to use assertions to check for pre and post conditions instead of using it for testing purposes.
- What was your experience of unit tests? : Unit tests will be a useful tool for verifying the validity of my code.
- What made you happy this week? : If you’ve been following the news this week, you may have heard of the stock market chaos involving GameStop’s stock. That’s been a highly entertaining story to me, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me chuckle more than anything else this week.
- What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week: I’m going to continue with the stock market subject from question 8. Due to the extreme volatility in the markets this week, certain brokerages decided to intervene in the market and disable purchases of certain stocks while continuing to allow the selling of those same stocks. Robinhood is a very very good trading app for new investors, however, they took part in this concerning behavior and many people may be looking for alternatives. For a good UI and platform most similar to Robinhood, I would recommend new investors to look into an app called WeBull which had far fewer issues this week. Fidelity is another option. While Fidelity had practically no technical issues this week, their platform probably isn’t as friendly to new users. I recommend Fidelity for more experienced investors looking to make a switch!
