Open Source Internship - Azis Toktobaev

        This is almost the end of the internship, and I wanted to take this time to reflect on my overall experience, answering selected blog prompts from the CS Department. Were your expectations for this experience realistic?  Why or why not?          I am extremely proud to say that I am at a stage in my life where I enter new experiences with minimum expectations. I have been burnt before by having my expectations not match the reality, and I learned to have a more realistic approach in life. The expectations I had were minimum: good team cooperation, strong leadership, and a lot of learning. These were reasonable expectations as I have never worked as a Research Assistant and an open-source developer before. So, yes, my expectations were realistic, and they have been mostly met. What have you done that you didn’t ever think you would be able to do?          I always underestimate myself as a coder and a...

        Today felt like a big victory for so many reasons. This entire project I did not have a chance to work with anyone as a pair programmer because I was focused on my personal research and I provided overall support to the other pair programmers. At the beginning of the Summer Institute, I worked with Sandesh and Imma, however, it did not feel like a pair-programming experience, because we were all learning about the scope of the project. It was a rookie boot camp, and we were all in it together. For the last three days, however, I was working with Roberto and Sama, and though it was 3 of us, it felt like a Pair Programming experience. We were creating the teamwork on Web Scraping, Mapping, and Pivot Tables. Yesterday was Roberto's last day, so Sama and I became a true pair-programming team.          I realized that I feel especially good when working with other people. I  experience a sense of responsibility and accountability...

         Today was such a wonderful day at work. The team is completely finished with the technical parts of Teamwork 6. We were able to create a custom HTML file from a dataset online that allows students to web scrape the data from it. We then ask students to web scrape materials from a URL to add to their existing dataframe. After, students map the data on geo-plot and analyze the results. Finally, students web scrape more data to create a pivot table to draw conclusions on coronavirus cases in different regions and sub-regions around the world.          This was a challenging task because we were required to operate at the highest level of learning where we not only needed to apply but create and ideate. We needed to think of the materials from the perspective of students learning it, and I think we did a great job. I believe that in order to best understand something you need to be able to teach it.  I enjoyed working with Robe...

         Two weeks ago, I had a difficult time thinking of the future teamwork for Chapter 6. I was not responsible for working on Chapter 6, and was only familiar with it partially. This is why yesterday I asked for Sama and Roberto's help. They are a team of pair programmers who rewrote the entirety of chapter 6 to fit a new business dataset, and are the most familiar with the contents. Together, we were able to quickly brainstorm ideas for the chapter, and by the end of the day were practically finished. Originally, I was thinking of providing students with a dataset and then asking them web scrape additional data. Sama offered that we create an HTML page ourselves, storing data in our preferred way instead of relying on an outside source.          This was so incredible for a few reasons. Firstly, I was very encouraged by Sama's willingness to be bold and create something brand new instead of adapting. Secondly, I really enjoyed how ...

         Today I asked Dr. Jan about which area of work she would like me to focus on, and I was told to continue working on preparing the class materials. I am realizing now that while I am competent at creating course materials, I do not enjoy this process as much as I enjoy solving different coding puzzles and challenges. I enjoy figuring out optimal ways in which students could improve their code, or simply learning about new tools in the industry. This is a revelation to me because I never enjoyed the idea of spending my work time on a software engineering project. However, this experience has shown that I enjoy hands-on computer science that involves problem-solving, and not teaching it.          I am also constantly questioning whether or not grad school would be right for me. I enjoy research about certain areas of computer science and not the others, which I assume is the norm. However, I do not enjoy the work on this particular...

         This was an interesting week of my Summer Institute experience - I was reminded about my humanity through my autoimmune disease. Last year I was diagnosed with a rare eye condition, uveitis, which is caused by an antigene in my body, HLA B27. I found out about this after being hospitalized during my previous internship at PAPER Magazine in New York City. That summer, I spent two weeks in pain caused by inflammation and constant migraines. This week I experienced similar pain after I started tapering down the number of steroid eye drops I put in my left eye. I was reminded about how it is hard to sleep and wake up when the condition worsens. Moreover, during the first half of the week, I had a difficult time looking at the screen and focusing on what my teammates were saying party because of pain and partly because I was worried about this being a permanent state of my health. I was suddenly reminded of the students that I have met through the Disability...