What did you do this past week?

This past week I spent most of my time following the workflow for our first project in the class. I was able to finish everything on time, although it was my first time using a lot of the tools we've been introduced to so I'm still not clear on if I did some things right. Only time can tell at this point, and I hope I get a good grade on it! I'm also happy to say that I received an offer for a summer internship with AT&T's Software Development Program. I've accepted it and so I've also spent a good deal of time this week filling out some paperwork for it.

What's in your way?

Nothing is in my way at this point. I've already taken some time to read over the specifications of project 2, which is called Australian Voting. I have a few ideas on how to go about solving the problem and implementing an optimization in order to fulfill the specs of the project. I've also found a partner for the project as well. I'll be working with Jonathan Brewer, a friend of mine that I took CS 439 with last semester.

What will you do next week?

Next week I'll dedicate a few days to coding the simplest possible solution for project 2 omitting the optimization so that I can make sure I have good feel for how I'll complete the project. I leaned in project 1 that the majority of the work would come from using continuous integration so I feel that the head start on it will benefit me greatly.

What's my experience of the class?

Class this week was really entertaining. I finally got a through explanation on both the * and & operator, and I know feel like I understand them. I always was a bit hazy on the underlying workings of both of them but Professor Downing went into a good amount of detail explaining how they work. We also had a presentation given to us by Bloomberg that outlined how an internship there would look.

What's my pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is this blog post from Google detailing how they are deploying a new feature for Google Maps. They're using machine learning in order to predict how difficult it will be to park at your destination in order to provide the information you need to decide weather or not to drive or to take public transportation.