Ayush : Week 6

Finally, our new hardware came in. 64 GB RAM | 1 TB SSD!
The graduate students are configuring the ELK stack on our new server and after basic analytics with elasticsearch, we all have been assigned a programming task.
I get to write code after 6 weeks.
I have to automate certain tasks with Bash and Python which I am really looking forward to.
TASK
The task was to use elasticsearch to do simple analytics with the data.
Our system has a nice GUI interface but I decided to avoid it to do it the correct way(or the hard way) :  through the commandline. This week was me making GET requests to servers over the RESTFUL API and learning how ElasticSearch and its Query language works. I learnt a lot of cool things this week and I hope to continue doing so.
Much to the labs hypothesis we discoverd that ElasticSearch being a NoSQL database is much faster than the SQL database. What would take minutes with MySQL is achieved in seconds with ElasticSearch.

STRUGGLES:
Probably, the most frustrating task is to wait. Wait for the server, wait for installation, wait for getting assigned a task etc. I try to be as proactive as possible and send emails asking for more to do.While I was waiting, I read more documentation on elasticsearch and also freshened up some of my web dev skills on codecademy for fun. 
As far as meetings are concerned, our meetings have been very strange because of all this ‘waiting’ that we have been doing and during the past 2 odd weeks the focus was just to get the system setup and continue working on the paper. I also find meetings sometime to be productivity killers. I am thinking of suggesting to bring whiteboard to meetings so that we can write out our ideas instead of just listening so all of us can remember for a longer time period what was discussed and this would make things less boring and more hands on.

As a lab, the goal of the project is not really to publish and instead is to get the analytics software stack up and running. Hence, the focus is mainly on the project followed by the paper. Therefore, publication venues have not been discussed.

Moreover, it is now crunch time! Just like at hackathons where you have very little time to get a lot done, the scenario is similar. All this ‘waiting’ slowed us down tremendously and now its time to really up the ante. The programming task I have been given is interesting and challenging enough to keep me occupied and there are talks that I may be given 2 weeks to finish it BUT I am going to challenge myself and try to knock it off within the next week.

4th of July, I have been asked to take a day off but me being how I am, I will if required SSH in to the development server and finish the appropriate tasks. During the weekend, I also plan to give the paper another look and try to fix it up again.