Day 13 as a NASA JPL intern

I refuse to miss a day of these blog posts because I honestly really wanna see my progress throughout the summer. This day was great because I only had one meeting that day and it was my office hours with Josh! This means I had the entire day to work on my code and work through my blockers. I had a ridiculous amount of tabs open in which most of them were Stack Overflow tabs because I was trying to figure out how to find the max and min values at specific indexes in a tuple within a list of tuples in the most efficient way possible. I also had another blocker where I couldn’t figure out how to read all the way to end of the file? It literally stressed me out so much. Logical Programming thinking is still something I need to improve at and that’s what my goal is for the summer. It’s very easy for me to get frustrated when I can’t break down the logic of a small problem and even more frustrating when I do know the logic but don’t know how to code it but having a peer definitely helps. However, I want to start to get better at debugging by myself. It’s a work in progress and I’m sure I’ll get better at it at the end of this summer. Anyways, I found out there’s a min and max built in Python function. However, the problem was I thought it literally just compared numerical values and spit out the lowest and largest values and I was so happy because I thought I was done with my program. But I encountered an issue when I was testing out a new data file where the min for the y axis was greater than the max…which is….not correct. So im guessing there was a string included in the data file when it was assessing the value and when using this function whenever there’s a string, it lexicographically compares the values. And so I’m guessing there was some string in the data that was assessed which caused this. I think Im going to have to make a function that just manually compares values? So this is what I’ll be working on for Monday.
However, one win this day is that I got to commit my code to my team’s github which was really exciting. I found out that VS code has a really nice UI for seeing changes when staging and committing code. Thanks again Josh for teaching me that. I also learned the process of versioning my code and what the semantics are for that. And I also went through the process of setting up my VENV for developing. I truly feel like I learned so much in the past week and I’m excited to go over all these details again. My goal is to make a doc outlining these processes so that if I ever had to train someone, I would also be able to easily explain it. Im ready for more learning and doing this week!! wahoo. Let’s get it poppin.