CS371p Fall 2021: Blog 5

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I spent a lot of time finalizing an assignment for the class I TA for. It took a bit of time to re-work the requirements/autograder, but I am definitely glad that I am done working on it now. I also found a partner for the Voting project, and started working on some of the basic requirements of the assignment. I also had an exam and a project due this week, so it was a fairly busy week overall.

What’s in your way?

I am very comfortable with C programming, and because C++ has such subtle changes from the original C syntax, sometimes it actually feels a bit harder to get comfortable with the language. That being said, I’ve enjoyed learning about the language so far, and as I work on the project / other C++ coding, it is definitely becoming a lot more comfortable.

What will you do next week?

This next week, I hope to finish the Voting project along with my partner. I also need to start preparing for midterms in some of my other courses, especially Compilers.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #5: Pair Programming?

I agreed with a lot of what the paper had to say about pair programming. In my experience, programming with a partner leads to higher quality code with far less superficial, annoying bugs.

What was your experience of vector, list, and deque, and invalidation?

I enjoyed getting to learn more about these various C++ data structures. The deque in particular was a bit hard to understand, just because it seems like it has a fairly complicated implementation. It’s easy to understand an arraylist/vector or a linkedlist/list, but the deque being an array of arrays made it somewhat difficult to comprehend.

What made you happy this week?

I have loved the cooler weather that we’ve had in Austin this week, and I hope it doesn’t get any hotter for the rest of the year! Besides all of the allergies, fall is a great time in Austin.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

If you’re looking for a place to host a personal website for your portfolio / resume, you can host simple webpages from the CS lab machines. This guide goes into a lot more detail about the specific steps to get it working, but you can easily host static webpages here, which can be a nice way to add some extra details to your resume or portfolio. I think some people even use their personal CS webpages to host their blog entries, which is an interesting idea!