General Work and Reflection

This post will be unlike a lot of the posts I've had in the past. I will be reflecting on work from most of my classes, rather than just Software Engineering. This is because there have not been any major things done to our Galaxy project since my previous blog posting.

For the Galaxy project, we presented our findings and results of our first deliverable to the class. This included an overview of the project, how we ran the built-in tests, and our experience. Galaxy has built-in python files that can be run in order to conduct tests. One example is "run_functional_tests.py". This runs all the functional tests (takes hours to run) built into Galaxy. Optionally, you can specify a parameter that allows you to run a specific subset of functional tests. We will definitely be doing that whenever going through our tests cases because it would be too much of a hassle to have to wait 6 hours for each time we want to run through our testing suite.

In some of my other classes, we have been working on various projects. In Bioinformatics, I am currently working on a partnered assignment where we have to find the longest common subsequence in two strands of DNA. It's odd because our code, in Python, works on small versions of the problem and it works for the examples given, but our code does not produce the correct answer when we have to submit it for a larger problem. It's very unlikely that the site we are submitting to has errors, but I'm starting to question it at this point. In Advanced Algorithms, we just received back tests whose main subject was computational complexity of various algorithms and applied analysis of other algorithms; we looked at topics such as searching and sorting algorithms, big O, big Θ, and big Ω, recurrence relations, and other topics. In Programming Language Concepts, we have been studying regular expressions, grammars, compilers (every part: Scanner -> Parser -> ...), C, and pointers. In Public Speaking, I am currently preparing a speech that has the objective of informing the audience about the marvels of AI and how it will affect everyone in the future. Aside from that, work on my Bachelor's Essay has not gone into full swing yet as we are still in a heavy development phase for Learn2Mine. We are in the process of beefing up the security for the site as there is an exploit that we found that we are vigorously working to patch up.