Weekly Reflection 24#4: Unstoppable Steps

This article is a record and reflection of life from 2024-01-21 to 2024-01-27.

Welcoming Spring with Spring Pancakes#

A friend of Xiong Xiaohua came to our house on Friday, and we thought it was close to the beginning of spring. So we made spring pancakes and served them with fish-flavored shredded pork, oyster sauce king oyster mushrooms, hot and sour shredded potatoes, and cold tossed cabbage. Among them, the recipe for fish-flavored shredded pork on the cooking website is perfect, and Xiong Xiaohua's cold tossed cabbage is highly praised, mainly thanks to the Wei Laoma chili powder from Guizhou; the recipe for fish-flavored shredded pork on the cooking website not only has an outstanding taste, but also all the main ingredients can be bought here, bringing back memories.

Although this is only the second time that I and Teacher Xiong have made spring pancakes together, our cooperation is already very mature. Kneading dough, fermenting dough, rolling and frying pancakes, the whole assembly line operation. I, who didn't eat spring pancakes much in China, actually made them by myself in the Netherlands, which is quite a special life experience.

Food is really something special. When eating spring pancakes, I suddenly thought of a long afternoon when I went into a spring pancake shop for no reason and had a meal. I can't remember what I ate at that time, but I remember the noisy voices in the misty steam and the dipping dish shining in the afternoon sun.

Unstoppable Steps#

This week, Xiaohua and I finished watching "Reply 1988" together. The unique charm of this drama lies in its ability to activate the memories of the audience's corners with the warmth hidden in the details, and to imagine a slower life in the faint homesickness. This transformation reminded me of the distant afternoon when I first opened Stardew Valley. Xiong Peiyun summarized it in "Freedom at High Altitude":

The San Francisco Chronicle once mocked America as a nation that yells at the microwave and still complains that it's too slow. Constant updates have also caused people to suffer from "novelty fatigue." The feeling of "out with the old, in with the new" has infected everyone in society. It is precisely because of this that some people are full of homesickness—how to return to the original values, live in the same house for a long time, preserve important things for a long time, and be loyal to each other. This is already a rare life.

After watching the whole drama, the part about the parents' lives in the first half touched us the most. When I was in China before, although I didn't often stay with my parents, I always thought I would go back whenever I had time, even though I didn't have much time to go back. However, after going abroad, this expectation of always being able to be together has disappeared, and only in the real separation can we re-examine the connection with our family. In this context, this drama appropriately provides an entrance to the past. In the feeling of coincidence with the plot, I discovered previously unnoticed family life scenes. At the same time, this drama also provides an emotional outlet, allowing us to better cherish the present while reminiscing about the past. Last year, after completing the visa procedures in Beijing and taking the high-speed train back home, I chatted with the aunt next to me, and she said, "You are so lucky to still have parents."

And about the day I'm going to talk about next, nothing decisive actually happened. I just vaguely felt that many things were quietly brewing under the surface of the water. But even so, I deliberately pretended not to know anything. Until I really figured it out, my life had already turned several pages, and I couldn't go back to save anything. Because, at that time, I had already lost my parents. - Hirokazu Kore-eda, "Still Walking"

The End of Winter Vacation#

There is only one week left until the start of the new semester, and I don't feel particularly excited. On the contrary, the increasingly warm weather makes me feel more cheerful. In winter, the days are short and the nights are long, especially in high latitudes. Therefore, the bright sunshine in the morning always brings a spring-like illusion and dispels the cold of the long night.

During this week, I mainly completed the registration for my Master's program and courses. Although the exam results for the pre-master were released early, the teacher had to wait until the resit to upload the grades, so the school system did not provide me with an Enrollment Certificate until recently. After nearly a month of waiting, the teacher finally uploaded the grades, and I officially registered for the Master's program.

In the language course, I didn't immediately register for courses because I considered the convenience of internships. This week, I wanted to take another Dutch language course, but I found that the registration for language courses had already closed, so I can only rely on self-study and Duolingo. Last year, I completed a 365-day streak on Duolingo, and I hope this foundation will make my self-study journey less difficult.

$1#

This year, I set a goal for myself to earn $1 in passive income.

One day, when I returned home, I saw a tutorial on YouTube about deploying a simple API service on RapidAPI. After taking a look, I found that the architecture used was still Node.js and Express.js, and the data source was obtained using cheerio for web scraping, and finally deployed to Heroku.

This project itself is not difficult, and the points that can be optimized in the future are:

Data storage: In the current solution, a web scraping request is made for each request. On the one hand, it puts a heavy load on the server and causes a lot of performance waste. On the other hand, when the number of requests increases, it is easy to trigger the website's anti-web scraping strategy, rendering the entire program ineffective. In the solution I will deploy in the future, I can store the web scraping results in a database. Currently, I am considering using MongoDB, which I have used before.

The inspiration from this project is:

Understanding JavaScript web scraping libraries. Previously, I had been using BeautifulSoup for web scraping in Python. Through my understanding of the cheerio library, my knowledge of full-stack technologies has improved (that is, using JavaScript to do everything).
API as a Service. Previously, when studying, I mainly understood APIs in terms of data transmission between the front-end and back-end, simply limiting the work of the back-end to the database. Through this project, I realized the possibility of APIs providing services in the input and output streams. In the summary article The Top 50 Most Popular APIs, most of the services provided by APIs are actually unrelated to databases, such as providing TikTok video downloads without watermarks Tiktok Download Without Watermark, NLP translation NLP Translation, and article data extraction and text mining Article Data Extraction and Text Mining. Among them, the application of machine learning is a new trend, allowing complex models to be applied to more scenarios through standard APIs.

Data Science#

This week, I switched back from focusing mainly on internships to continuing my studies on DataCamp.

I mainly learned about seaborn this week and wrote a blog post titled A Guide to the Power of hue in Seaborn Visualizations.

I also completed the project "Visualizing the History of Nobel Prize Winners" on DataCamp. I was surprised at how quickly I forget things. I forget a lot of basic slicing operations after learning them and not using them. I still need to continue with daily coding exercises.

Weekly Gems#

Awesome DataScience#

QuantEcon is a complete tutorial on quantitative economics using Python, which aligns with my future direction in Financial Risk Management.
Colly is a web scraping library written in Go. I have no knowledge of Go, but it should be enjoyable to read the code of a project that puts "Elegant" in its About description.
Neet Code is a website similar to LeetCode that I discovered on Reddit. The author has selected 150 questions and provided detailed explanations, which can enhance understanding of programming.

Web Development#

google-indexing-script uses the Google Search Console API and Web Search Indexing API to read a website's sitemap and automatically submit URLs that have not been indexed by Google. The author says in the project description,

Use this script to get your entire site indexed on Google in less than 48 hours.

Although I strictly followed the author's instructions for setup, I found that the author missed some explanations. I plan to write a blog post to supplement them.
In the previous blog post, when I tried to use the cover image URL from Douban Reading, I found that Douban has anti-hotlinking settings, so I couldn't display the image on my website. After a simple Google search, I found that I could use the weserv.nl service as a proxy to bypass the image referencing restrictions.