Given how we fell a little behind because of hardware/performance issues, this week we all got a lot of tasks to do.
I learnt a lot of cool new API’s that Python has to offer and also how to use public,private key in SSH.
Some API docs I read:
TASK
I essentially had to do a combination of what both the other undergraduate interns were asked to do.I had to automate data cleaning and file transferring between servers. There are certain things that can only be performed on the development server and some can only be performed on the data server so I had to write Bash and Python scripts to do the processing and move files over.
This week I felt I was at a hackathon. All the code I wrote worked but it was very ugly since the objective became to get it done as fast as possible, that was bound to happen. Morever, sleep was no longer a priority. To be honest though, I am enjoying every part of it!
STRUGGLES
I suffered quite a few setbacks this week. Since our data is sensitive, I dont have permission to scp files over to my local machine but the graduate students do so they gave me a couple of test files to do test my scripts with. This consumed time. Also, there is no GUI interface on the servers so whatever I do has to be done since nano and vim. Unfortunately, my knowledge is very limited of those two. This also consumed time. Another thing is that all our tasks are interdependent. I rely on the other interns finishing majority of their work before I can finish mine. This also consumed time. Using libraries and understanding API calls I have not used before, I spent a lot of time on stackoverflow. This answer was particularly helpful : Subprocess Communicate
The biggest setback occurred when my scripts ran locally but failed to run on the server. I think I took Alex’s advice of “move fast and break things” (Facebook) a little too seriously. THIS HAPPENED THE DAY OF THE PRESENTATION! I knew there were certain parts that just were not going to run but I did not know there could be such massive problems. I also had no nice GUI IDE to help debug. The graduate student suggested vi instead of nano and I figured it was something to do with syntax however fixing every little detail was not helping. I decided to open up two windows and rewrites components of my original script on the data server. THINGS BEGAN TO WORK! By meeting time, I had things to show!
Meeting with mentor
We all presented what we had accomplished and although I was not fully able to complete what I was asked to do, my mentor was still impressed given how much progress I made in very little time.
Research component
Mentor has made it clear that our project is priority because we wont have a paper if the project is incomplete. Coming to the poster, we have reserved the last two weeks to focus on the poster and the focus currently is to finish the project.
All in all, a very small but eventful week.
CODE AWAY!