1. What did you do this past week? This past week was the first exam in 439. Every exam that I proctor makes me even more thankful that is over and done with. It also gives me wicked flashbacks for those anxious moments shared by everyone leading up to the exam. I then spent a fair amount of time grading those exams, which is always a fun and learning experience. I’m thankful for the chance to solidify my understanding of operating systems by TAing for that course. I also took a silly exam for my History of Rock class and began studying for the exam next week.

2. What’s in your way? The only blocker I would consider to have is the unknown content to review and study for this exam coming up. I do not know what to expect.

3. What will you do next week? I will focus heavily on studying for the exam. I already review the quizzes often, so it will mostly include implementing stuff we’ve talked about. Something tells me iterators are important…

Thoughts on the course, so far… We had another CS graduate who works in industry speak this week, and I enjoyed some more insight into the life of a developer. The more information and exposure I get the better. I have been assigned my team placement for the Summer and am looking forward to some more time developing in the real world. I found it interesting that real companies out there use Github as their code store. For some reason, I never thought of the enterprise version to actually be used for commercial business.

Tip of the Week: Speaking of Github, did you know about git –rebase? It can been used to clean up your commits into a nice log of professional looking work. Having a log that looks like a kindergartner wrote it is never good. I was made aware of this last summer when looking at the commit history of projects at Amazon. The interns stuck out like sore thumbs with their shitty commit messages and erratic work. Don’t do that! More about that can be found here.