- What did you do this past week?
I attended class, did quizzes in breakout rooms, and payed attention to lecture as per usual during the weekdays, but got working with Ian on Project 2: Netflix Prize over this weekend. Most of what I would say I accomplished this week, I did with Ian. We created the minimum set of caches that Downing recommended, and implemented most of the methods and installed all necessary libraries. We currently have an RMSE of 1.004, so I think if we integrate another dimension of consideration of the data, we can break the 1.0 barrier.
- What’s in your way?
Figuring out what other factors to consider with the data on our project is going to be difficult, but I’m confident we can figure it out by the end of the week. Also, I have to prepare for the test coming up, and brush up on my C++ understanding.
- What will you do next week?
Mostly review C++, specifically the pointer operations, as I can’t seem to get a solid grasp on those before I float to something else that I’m focusing on. I hope to get in a good performance on the test that is coming up.
- What was your experience of exceptions, consts, and Boost serialization? (this question will vary, week to week)
Exceptions were very easy to understand as long as you get object oriented programming. Consts, and their ordering with the type when initializing a variable, in tandem with pointers and references is quite a hassle to learn. Speaking of hassles, Boost serialization was very, very cryptic, as Downing really didn’t give any explicit instructions as how to integrate it into our caching, but nonetheless we persevered.
- How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?
Chatting and playing video games with friends has been the biggest pick me up thus far.
- What made you happy this week?
Watching people play chess on twitch. There was a sudden influx of chess interest on that platform due to grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura’s entrance into the streaming scene, and it was really fun to connect with a game that I used to cherish as a child.
- What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
If you have a Linux system available to you, try to imitate everything you would have used Windows to do in Linux. I find it a much more productive platform to get my work done than Windows.
