It’s week three and one of the wierdest things to think about is that this class is about halfway done. Having never take summer school before, it’s currently blowing my mind. Six weeks might not sound that short, but after 18 years of semester long classes six weeks is flying.

This week we were visited by an engineer at Rackspace to give a presentation about setting up our own web server and man was that interesting. It’s amazing to think that I will be able to start setting up my own web server practically from scratch (sans hardware). Having only really been a consumer of APIs, I’m really looking forward to having the opportunity to create one myself. Another thing I really took from his talk were some of his advice on good documentation/note taking and his advice on giving talks. I’ve always taken to heart making my code as readable as possible, breaking up logic whenever possible to give each function their own specific purpose, and prefering longer variable names as opposed to single charactr temp variables. However, I’ve never given thought about bringing a notepad to meetings and whatnot. To be fair, however, the only meetings I’ve really had to attend are quick stand-ups and such where it’s more of a check-up rather than assignments. As I move into the workforce, however, it will definitely be something I keep in mind.

Lastly, I want to say that I have enjoyed the pair programming aspect of project 2. Just that fact that I can constantly be having a conversation with someone while I work has been a welcome change. Apart from that trying to come up with a better recommendation algorithm has been a very easy topic to keep discussing since neither of us had a perfect answer. Having always been a rather fast typer and a sucker for shortcut keys I tend to have a rather fast workflow, which usually meant I was the one typing away at the keyboard. Meanwhile my partner took the opportunity to ask me a lot of questions about my workflow, some of which I was surprised he hadn’t herd about and became rather exceited to tell him about it. This has also been one of the first times ever I’ve been active in the class Piazza forms, and having finally taken the dive in it’s been awesome to see people take my advice or solution and rolling with it. One of the first examples of which was when I posted a link to the Jekyll-Now repo for this website template, and since the very first blogging assignment I noticed a good majority of people have been able to set it up without much questions.

Tip of the week

Seeing both of my partners for both of my classes enter their credentials for GitHub every time they pushed or pulled started bugging me so bad. I forgot what life was like before git’s credential helper. To be honest I only know about the SSH key, which is actually what I thought was recommended, however it turns out they actually recommend using HTTPS over SSH. I guess having to generate multiple keys IS more anoying than just caching username/password.