Leadership skills

 Today I worked on standardizing and fixing my code. Inside the paper we are submitting, we have included a link where everyone interested can find our code, organized and fully functional in all operating systems. Now, these two words sound easy, but I left the office today with a headache, as it is tough for me to locate the correct files and code to add them to the repository. The reason I am struggling so much is that when I was writing it, I left minimal comments, and I have so many files with the same name but with a number in the end, like cluster.py and cluster1.py. At the time, when I was experimenting with the code, it made sense, and I thought I would not forget it in 3 weeks when I would write the paper. Comments and good names are seriously the best things a programmer can do to their selves, which is something I learned in both 224 and 236, but I never used it in any of the two courses. Back then, I was not penalized, but now I am since it's taking so much more time to figure out what each file is doing, especially when these files contain, on average, 500-800 lines of code. I feel really sad about it, and I will, in the future, leave comments everywhere and learn from that mistake.

The format of the repository was given to me by Deepak, with specific instructions about each file and its functionality. Now, when I was doing the final evaluation on Handshake, I noticed there was a question about what degree this internship has contributed to our leadership skills. This is where Deepak giving me the format comes into play. Although I was mostly working autonomously, many times, I felt like I was not given the opportunity to show my leadership skills. I am not yet sure if that is because I am an intern, and an undergraduate student, so I guess that they dont trust me as much. Another thought I had is that it could be that research is so strict that many of the time, there is no place for showing leadership skills or creativity. In any case, I think that I could have improved my leadership skills if I had been given a chance to be in a team or at least collaborate with other people. I only collaborated with Deepak, who was essentially my boss; therefore, there was not much team spirit or leadership space there. The advice I would give myself three months ago, on that matter, would be to try to talk to other people in the lab more, in order to ask their opinions, maybe collaborate or even help them out in a part of their project.