Week 5

Software Engineering (CS 373) Spring 2017

What did you do this past week?

This week has been a really good week. I've had four interviews, two with a machine learning team and I'm very optimistic. I had to miss class on Wednesday to get my citizenship but at least, now, that is finally done. A remote kill switch has been fitted in my robotics project now. I turned in the Netflix project on Thursday with an RMSE of 0.98. The FoCS dinner on Monday was great and I have at least two interviews next week from the FoCS dinner. I had to miss the CNS career fair on Tuesday, though, to attend two interviews that day.

What's in your way?

I can't say that I have anything in my way now but my GitHub streak isn't doing too well and I have too many unfinished projects that I need to get to.

What will you do next week?

I have an Algo midterm on Monday. I'm waiting for co-op offers for the Fall and I have a couple more interviews for that next week. I will also need to apply for a passport early next week. My team for Project 3 has been formed. I am ready to start working as soon as the project description is released but we'll also need to meet and decide on how we will be splitting up the work. With a team of 6, pair programming with everyone present doesn't seem reasonable. Pair programming can work but I think we should split up the work and have 3 groups working with frequent meetings so that we can continously check on the overall progress.

What’s my experience of the class?

The submission process for the Netflix project was a lot better. There weren't as many last minute changes and overall, it was just a much better experience.

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

Stop the common trash dove with this simple JSON snippet.
Trash Dove
This bird has been driving me mad for the past week. So, I wrote a content blocker extension for Safari that stops the animation of the bird on Facebook and hides the Giphy trash dove gif. I'm sorry that you need to see it here but if you follow these steps, it will be gone forever. If you wish to, you can add more URLs to block as well in the editor above.

  1. Go to Develop in your Safari menu bar (if it is not there, Preferences -> Advanced -> Show Develop menu in menu bar)
  2. Click on Show Extension Builder and add an extension
  3. Copy this JSON snippet to a file, save it as blockerList.json and save it in the extension folder created in step 2
  4. Set the content blocker file to blockerList.json and install
If you are not in the developer program, whenever you quit and reopen Safari, you will need to go back to the extension builder and re-enable it and it may also mess with your history which is a bit of a pain but not as painful as having to see that bird.