This morning we all decided to meet with Anat and have her give us an introduction into the concept of dynamic programming, and how that fits in with our rerouting problem. I have not had much experience talking about dynamic programming, and I have not done much with routing problems that are as complex as ours, so it was helpful for me to get some more background on just how to even talk about and discuss the problem formally. We're planning on continuing our discussion of dynamic programming on Tuesday, which I think will be helpful because I'm still not as clear as I would like to be on how to apply it to our situation and what constraints we need to define and which we could, should, or won't need to define.
So everyone in the DSSG program was offered to the chance to sign up for these Software Carpentry classes today and tomorrow, but I was not put on the email because I'm not technically a DSSG intern. Software Carpentry is a series of classes and tutorials that are basically meant to take you from beginner to intermediate level on basic programming skills (R, Python, bash commands, etc.) very quickly. Turns out that everyone in my group except me had signed up and said they would do the classes, so after the dynamic programming intro I was mainly working on my own as the only one really focused on the project. Thankfully, my team members would come out and check in with me and help clear up questions I had whenever they had breaks from the Software Carpentry sessions, and Rohan actually skipped the second half of the afternoon session because he felt that it was too much of an introductory class and he was not really getting much out of it. Also, Valentina didn't sign up for the classes, so she was working with me on fixing an issue* that came up when transferring the full data set to the SQL server. Along with this, I was also asking Rohan to help me while I tried to remember the syntax I would need to create a new column for our dataframe in R that would track the time (based on ETAs) for each leg of a run, which would in turn be used to help us find the ugly rides. I haven't programmed in R in quite a while, so today was pretty frustrating with just trying to remember simple syntax problems. It helped that I started by reviewing Frank's code to see what his does and how I might modify it further.
*For those curious, the issue was that when transferring from Access to csv to the SQL server, we were getting quotation marks in every string field in the SQL server database, which is incredibly annoying for querying because then you have to do the specific single quote then double quote syntax whenever you want to search or filter on a specific string. To get rid of this, we had to actually start again from the Access db file and separate on semicolons instead of commas because one of our fields had cells that had text occasionally separated by commas.
So everyone in the DSSG program was offered to the chance to sign up for these Software Carpentry classes today and tomorrow, but I was not put on the email because I'm not technically a DSSG intern. Software Carpentry is a series of classes and tutorials that are basically meant to take you from beginner to intermediate level on basic programming skills (R, Python, bash commands, etc.) very quickly. Turns out that everyone in my group except me had signed up and said they would do the classes, so after the dynamic programming intro I was mainly working on my own as the only one really focused on the project. Thankfully, my team members would come out and check in with me and help clear up questions I had whenever they had breaks from the Software Carpentry sessions, and Rohan actually skipped the second half of the afternoon session because he felt that it was too much of an introductory class and he was not really getting much out of it. Also, Valentina didn't sign up for the classes, so she was working with me on fixing an issue* that came up when transferring the full data set to the SQL server. Along with this, I was also asking Rohan to help me while I tried to remember the syntax I would need to create a new column for our dataframe in R that would track the time (based on ETAs) for each leg of a run, which would in turn be used to help us find the ugly rides. I haven't programmed in R in quite a while, so today was pretty frustrating with just trying to remember simple syntax problems. It helped that I started by reviewing Frank's code to see what his does and how I might modify it further.
*For those curious, the issue was that when transferring from Access to csv to the SQL server, we were getting quotation marks in every string field in the SQL server database, which is incredibly annoying for querying because then you have to do the specific single quote then double quote syntax whenever you want to search or filter on a specific string. To get rid of this, we had to actually start again from the Access db file and separate on semicolons instead of commas because one of our fields had cells that had text occasionally separated by commas.