wina

22 | cs student | france the blog of a girl who’s trying so hard not to waste her potential

[thewinastudyblog]

heyyyyy !!!!

my name is wina and i’m a 22 year old computer science student currently based in france. i still have one more year of university but right now i’m on an internship till the first week of september but i’m still doing a lot of studying on the side.

my study inspos are: rory gilmore (highschool version) & elle woods.

i’ve decided to start this blog because i wanted some place to keep myself accountable for studying, working out and reading. so if that interests you, follow me and let’s keep each other accountable !!!

[thewinastudyblog]

got a call back after the technical interview and they said they were impressed with me and that i solved the problems faster than they expected !!!!!

[thewinastudyblog]

a day in my life as an web development intern (16/06)

i’m currently interning as a backend developer and am responsible for building an API using Flask(Python) and Postgresql.

09 - 10 = get there, turn on my laptop and open all the apps i need, most of the time it’s PyCharm for coding and Chrome cause I google a LOT. I also spend the first few 15 minutes trying to remember where I am and what I am supposed to do during the dat. and sometimes during this first hour I go get coffee.

10 - 11:30 = for my API, i needed to find a dataset that has all the schools in France with their gps coordinates, and so basically I found a database and wrote a python script to extract the data needed and then try to put a sample into my database.

11:30 - 12:30 = just like the schools, i also needed all the hospitals in france, and when I started looking at the dataset I was going to use for this I realized that there was no way I would get the gps coordinates from this specific dataset.

12:30 - 13:30 = here i went back home and ate a quick lunch.

13:30 - 15:30 = i found a better dataset and so i wrote a script to get the data i wanted from it and also tested putting some data into my database and made sure it worked. this script also involved clinics and nursing homes for the elderly cause I also needed them for my API. 15:30 - 17:00 = around this time I started trying to put all the data I imported from the school and hospital datasets into my database, and at one point I ran into some schools that didn't have a longitude and latitude, and I was like how do I fix that. So I spent around 30 mins googling and trying to write a script that could convert addresses into latitude and longitude, but it wasn't perfect LOL. 17:00 - 17:15 = spoke quickly to my supervisor abt this issue and what could be done about it 17:15 = turn off my laptop and monitors, pack my bag and go home.

as a whole, today was kinda fun ? even tho it was mostly spent struggling and trying to figure out how to do every single thing without using chatgpt (only used it once and it was at a time of dire need so I'm really proud of myself). honestly it's way more fun not using chatgpt cause you get to truly learn how to read documentation and know on your own how things work, and you also learn so much from trying and failing and i personally enjoy it so much !!! but yeah anyways, what's coming is definitely harder than what i've already done, but I've never been more ready. here's to more days of proving to myself over and over again how powerful my brain actually is and how good i am at this.

[vanessas-bookereport]

one thing that so many students forget is that, a win is a win. if you planned on doing english homework but instead you finished your history essay, celebrate that, don’t be upset that you didn’t sick to your plan, at least you got SOMETHING DONE. a win is a fucking win and don’t let anyone tell you different.

[thewinastudyblog]

haven’t posted the entire week omg oops 😭😭

but anyways this week has been about me stepping into my power and finding out how powerful my brain actually is and realising that i’m actually way better off not using chatgpt.

[thewinastudyblog]

i kinda aced the technical interview

[thewinastudyblog]

this weekend summarised in one picture. hope this pays off tomorrow during the technical interview. but honestly, even if i don’t pass, i’m still going to be so proud of myself because the old me could’ve never been able to do all of this in one weekend.

[anonymousdormhacks]

Whats the opposite of gothic? I'm in love with comp sci anti-gothic where it's just people being surprisingly polite and nice and funny through computers. A program's first lines are always "Hello world!". SMTP protocols apparently say "hello, pleased to meet you" to each other to establish a connection with a handshake. Python has a different version called Andaconda, which has a smaller version called miniconda. C++ is just C continuously improving on itself, because the ++ operator means to add one onto a previous value, and C# is two ++ stacked on top of each other. Lawmakers have to talk about the ethics of saving "cookies" to computers because one guy liked fortune cookies and decided to call them that. The internet itself wasn't created with security in mind because it was just meant to be a way for a group of people who trusted each other using it to send each other information, and so on, and so forth

[thewinastudyblog]

did 10 leetcode problems today and they took me eight hours.

[thewinastudyblog]

currently making a classical music playlist for studying/coding cause there’s not a single good one out there on spotify. people think that just because classical and instrumental music in general don’t have lyrics then it will be easy to focus while listening to them. well that’s not true, especially when you’re familiar with a lot of melodies on there. just because my brain isn’t singing along doesn’t mean it’s not following along with the music. the perfect instrumental music for studying should sound beautiful enough that i romanticize my studying, but at the same time should be calm and slow and not have too much elements in it so that it doesn’t disturb me and i can go through a studying session without wanting to turn the music off because i cannot hear my thoughts over it.

[thewinastudyblog]

i have the technical interview for the apprenticeship this monday. a weekend of leetcoding awaits me.

[thewinastudyblog]

i forgot to say that yesterday i did 3 leetcode problems 😌

[thewinastudyblog]

some advice i have for future computer science students

as soon as you learn data structures & complexity, run, don’t just walk, RUN to leetcode while the knowledge is still fresh in your mind. your entire career and whether you’ll get a well-paying job vs an average paying job depends on how good you are at leetcode.

build as many projects as you can, and i’m not talking tutorial projects that take a few hours, i’m talking big projects. working on a project for a month or two will get you really far.

if you don’t have an internship, do not waste your summers, learn new technologies, languages, concepts and build projects you can put in your cv.

try to participate in hackathons and coding competitions. it’s okay if you fail, but you’ll learn a lot.

learn how to read documentation. most tutorials don’t even cover a quarter of what a language, framework or software has to offer. the sooner you make reading documentation a habit, the better it is. and yes i know, documentation is long and hard to read. my advice is only read the sections that are relevant to you in the moment. something i also personally do is look at the code examples at the same time as i am reading the paragraphs, it really helps easily absorb the information.

try not to use chatgpt. and if you do, then at least use it for stuff you know you can do yourself and will be able to correct if the bot gets it wrong. using chatgpt is a very slippery slope and the more you use it the less you learn.

the math is important. math teaches you how to reason and how to develop better logical thinking. just because you don’t see yourself using the xyz theorem you’ve learnt anytime in the future doesn’t mean the math is useless.

be prepared to get comfortable with erros, issues, bugs and just problems in general. you’ll be coding 30% of the time and debugging 70% of the time (i’m exaggerating but sometimes it feels like this is the case lol), and that’s okay, it’s how we learn and the sooner you embrace it the better. if you’re someone who easily gets frustrated, then this is a heads up.

learn as you go. there is no such thing as waiting until you know everything before you start on a project. the only way and the best way to learn in this field is practice, so build, build, and build.

these are all the ones i could think of for now. feel free to comment your thoughts and questions <3

[thewinastudyblog]

things i did today {04/06}:

did not use chatgpt a single time (celebrate the small wins lol)

slayed at my internship yup yup (my supervisor was not there so i kinda did what i wanted)

7500+ steps

read my book some more

aced my apprenticeship interview (this one was just an HR interview, it’s the technical interview i’m scared of)

did two leetcode problems (kinda proud)

[thewinastudyblog]

the interview for next year’s apprenticeship went well !!!

[thewinastudyblog]

i love you human written documentation, i love you person who’s had my exact same problem 7 years ago, i love you people on forums trying to help, i love you medium articles abt how to do a specific thing, i love you google search that shows me the answer as the first result. mwah!

[thewinastudyblog]

things i did today {03/06}

slayed in my internship as usual (spent half the time reading documentation)

walked 9600+ steps (don’t ask me why i didn’t reach 10k)

could not workout and could not leetcode cause i had to go buy groceries and do my laundry (and now that i think abt it i’ve worked out for 3 consecutive days and needed a break)

read 70+ pages of the book i’m currently reading

prepared for an interview i have tomorrow for an apprenticeship.

(pics are not mine)