Welcome to Week 4 of the CS 373 Blog.

1. What did you do this past week?

   This week was mostly focused on working on the Netflix proejct. This project is trying to get us to implement a solution for the Netflix prize, which involves coming up with an improvement to the recommendation algorithm for Netflix. It has been an interesting assignment so far.

2. What’s in your way?

   This assignment has tested the limits of my familiarity with Python. I have been learning some new tricks specific to the language as we have been going along. The discussions in lecture have been helpful in helping us re-work our design. Overall it has been a good learning experience.

3. What will you do next week?

   I’m looking forward to getting this project finished and submitted. After this, I’ll try to get a headstart on studying for Test #1. I want to be sure and do well on it.

4. Experiences

   We had a guest speaker this week, which I thought was pretty cool! It is interesting to hear about a lot of the tools we are using and how they actually are put into use by software teams working in the industry. It was cool to hear from a yonunger company, because it seems like such a team would be more interested in trying out new tools and methods.

5. Tip of the week

   For a tool this week, I started using the Slack messaging application. It seems to be very popular these days. Overall, I think it will be a useful tool going forward in a larger group. At this stage, it seems like overkill to use with only two people, so I have only played around with it a bit.