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Week 6 - Midterm Presentation

​Week 6, with most of the backend finished, I began working on the web interface. During the first week, when Jesse and I discussed this project, we agreed that we wanted to use a Python web framework. We chose Flask, since it was simple to use and quite powerful. Since I haven’t done much web development before, I spent most of Monday and Tuesday getting aquatinted with Flask. I went step by step through a tutorial on Flask, and also brushed up on HTML and CSS.

Week 5 - Interface design & group meeting

Week 5, I spent most of my time working on the csv parser and revising my code. Nothing really exciting happened this week; I mainly worked on refining my previous work. I talked to Jesse, who wanted me to present my progress at the group meeting on Friday. Since my midterm presentation was next week, this was a good opportunity to practice for that. I made some mockup images of the web interface for the presentation to give a general visual demonstration on the functionality.

Week 4 - New data interface

Week 4 was actually quite short, since we went to Bonnevile dam on Tuesday and had a day off on Friday for 7/4. With most of the plotting backend finished, Jesse and I discussed how users would actually use these tools. He suggested that users should be able to upload their own data, in the form of a csv (comma delimited) text file. That file would contain observation data obtained from stations, with time and a variable (such as salinity). Currently my plotting interface worked with data container files, with data in various arrays in a specific format.

Week 3 - Code Revision and New Plots

This week, I spent most of my time working on improving and revising my code that I had written over the last two weeks. Although my code was fully functional, there were many revisions to make, style wise and readability-wise. Currently, my code was composed of an assortment of top-level functions. To increase usability, code maintenance, and take advantage of all the Python features, I used object-oriented programming - the concept of having objects with attributes and methods.

Week 2 - Debugging, segfaults, and progress

​This week, I spent most of my time with the python debugger, going line by line through my code to see why everything wasn’t working as it should. After some consideration, I decided to approach the data processing part in a different way. Turns out, the processing library I had been looking through already contained utilities to extract station data. However, I hit a brick wall when I started getting cryptic segfault errors. I spend the rest of the day Monday trying to get this code to work, but to no avail.

Week 1: Into to Data Visualization

Hi, my name is Paul Pan, and I am an undergraduate intern at CMOP for this summer. I will be working with Jesse Lopez in Dr. António Baptista’s group to develop a new web interface to create model products usable by non-specialists. Specifically, I will be creating the backend and frontend of an interface where users can upload their own data and generate different types of plots. Currently, this functionality is not possible with the data explorer on the CMOP web page.

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