Learning Blog

 This week I've been looking into what I'll need to create a database connector for our LLM application. Essentially it will allow us to use data from our existing database of user movie lists. With that set up, we'll be able to feed our user data to an LLM to ask it for movie suggestions based on a particular user's lists. I've been reading through LlamaIndex's documentation on its DatabaseReader class and also looking through the structure of our project's existing database. I have also started writing some code on the file for the connector and am currently testing to make sure it connects to our database as expected. My plan for next week is to hopefully have the database connector finished. Once that's done, I'll add an argument to a playlist generation function so that it knows to generate a playlist using this connector (with our user's movie list data) instead of general movie data we're currently feeding it. I'm not facing any ma...

This week's material was short but I enjoyed learning about the role of firewalls in protecting networks. Also, it's the last week of class and I worked on the last project with my fellow team members. That was a great experience and I hope to work with them again. I had a few hiccups lately after trying some changes to my Mininet setup for the last lab (my Mininet version installed through UTM was missing POX and I couldn't reinstall another version that included it before the lab deadline). But other than some technical lab issues, I learned a lot from the course material and look forward to learning more about computer networks on my own as I find the field very interesting.

 This week we learned about routing algorithms. I've seen Dijkstra's algorithm before, but it's nice to see how it's applied in the real world. In my mind, thinking about how it will be used in a professional setting (and why it's better than an alternative algorithm in some situations) helps me understand it at a deeper level than the first time I learned about it.

 His week we learned about the network layer, including routing and forwarding. I found this week's chapter interesting because it answers some questions I've had about how the internet works outside of the applications I use, my computer, and my local network. A lot of that tends to be abstracted away from users. We also learned about IP address conventions for versions 4 and 6. I found it helpful to review hexadecimal numbers since it's been a while since I've done conversions in another class.