What did you do this past week?
This week, I tried to finish the idb project. It didn’t pan out too well, given the lack of teammates and the severe disparity in our priorities. We did get a sizable amount of work done, however, and we have a lot of the requirements working. Problem is we had a lot of trouble with our database. For some reason, trying to access the database on Travis and from localhost works perfectly fine, no problems whatsoever. Google Cloud Platform, however, won’t allow access to the database, as I found out after much narrowing down. Our Travis and local tests led me to believe with high confidence that the system I had set up would allow us to access the database when pushed to production. When we finally did push to production, the sudden errors held us back from completing the project, since we couldn’t query our own databse to populate our website. I’m considering fixing this soon, but also not. I can’t say my morale is particularly high.
Also, it was my sister’s birthday this weekend! That was a ton of fun :D It feels good seeing family friends.

What’s in your way?
This project. It might not be such an issue, but given the situation, I’m expected to spend far more time on it than average. But enough complaining.

What will you do next week?
I don’t know, really. I know I have an AI project to do, but otherwise I guess I’ll just keep taking stabs at this project until something goes right. I also need to start applying for summer jobs. Maybe the help desk or IHOP are hiring, or something. Who knows.
I’m also going to pay the CMHC a visit while I’m at it.

What’s my experience of the class?
Despite how poorly everything is going, I really can honestly say that this project has made me more proud than any other I’ve ever made. The bright side of having more responsibilities on this assignment is that I’ve learned about a lot of tools that I wouldn’t have been familiar with otherwise. This is the first time I’ve set up a real working website, set up and played with a server, designed and implemented an API, used Google Cloud Platform, and more. I’m particularly proud of the way I got Travis, Github, and GCP to come together. There’s still some optimizations to be made there, but those will come in time.

tip-of-the-week?
This week, I’d like to point to this paper on neural networks. I’ve always been interested in playing with them and this paper is inspiring me to do just that! In particular, I’d like to see how useful they are in parsing letters out of images. I have a fun project in mind that could make use of that!
Until next time!