Week 3 Reflection

This week we move towards to the web scraping! Still can’t believe that because it sounds like a real computer major student now. I know I should not feel powerful for this moment because there is still too much thing I need to learn. But let me cheer for the first week survival now. Even the pace here still hard for me to catch, but at least I can read the chapter, communicate with the classmates successfully. Better than I imagine.

Still, afraid of the failure during workshop, checked as much as I can before the course. This week we got a new lecturer Chris. He explained the connection between the scraping and academic work. I can feel this skill and tool might be play very important role in my future work, especially the part of data collecting. I mean, surely you can collect data manually, but scraping sounds cooler, and do make work easier, and faster.

Of course, success came with mistake. During the workshop, when I scrapped the data from BBC website, it just didn’t work for unknown reason. Chris helped me fix it and turned out the place “_” should be “_ _”. I mean, I know the computer thing is just like that, very unreasonable sometimes, know it too well when I tried to fix my psp psv 3ds or something by myself, but? I have to admitted that I feel extremely confused and helpless at that time. I guess that’s the reason why my friend told me last week “it’s a work heavily rely on the experience.” And that’s why Chris can find what’s wrong with the scraping and fix it, and I can’t. The reason is simple, he did more work than me, gained more experience than me. Before the workshop I might would just view it as a very, unreasonable thing, something even like magic, and pass it without thinking. Because I had no idea where is the direction and how I can improve, but now I finally know it. Not all things happened in campus are bad thing.

Chirs showed us a google form which can just run python on that without installation. That is the real magic for me I guess.

But in another way, thinking about if someone can collect my review in such faster way (even I published them public) still make me feels like, maybe I should be more careful when I post something on any platform in the future.

At the end, this workshop did raise my interest about the algorithms, different language and programming. The 2hrs time is so short for workshop this week. I definitely love to have more workshop about it, and really want to have more extra online course (if I really have time after I done other coursework!).