CS371p Fall 2021: Blog 6
What did you do this past week?
This week, my partner and I made a lot of progress on the voting assignment. We implemented a solution that does not require iterating over all ballots during redistribution, and after a few bug fixes were able to pass all three Hackerrank tests. I also spent a lot of time working on assignments and projects for other courses, specifically the parsing lab for compilers.
What’s in your way?
There honestly does not feel like there’s a lot in my way right now. Job hunting is of course stressful, but this semester has been going pretty well so far. I feel like I have been able to get into a good routine, and now it’s just a matter of staying on top of my work until the end of the semester. Part of me was a bit disappointed at first at the fact that lectures will remain online for the rest of the semester, but I still find the online lectures really engaging and I really enjoy not having to commute to UT on certain days out of the week.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I’m going to work with my partner to refactor our Voting code, and satisfy the rest of the workflow requirements (such as setting up unit tests, acceptance tests, etc). I also need to finish up my compilers assignment by Friday, so this will likely be a really busy week for me overall.
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #6: Single Responsibility Principle?
I thought that the Single Responsibility Principle reading was really informative. I enjoy learning about object oriented principles, because it makes me think about my design choices more critically when approaching a software project. Sometimes I wish there were a few more examples in the writings, though. I also like that they mention that these principles are important to learn/understand, but that there are times where they don’t need to be applied.
What was your experience of stack, queue, priority_queue, values, pointers, and references?
The data structure lectures were a nice refresher on some of the content from 314. It’s also interesting to learn about the differences between the implementations of the data structures in Java vs. C++. I’ve had a lot of experience with pointers vs values in C, but references have been new to me. I thought the lectures were really useful, and feel like I have a much better grasp on how they work now.
What made you happy this week?
I’m glad that it’s slowly getting less hot, and am super excited for colder weather over the next couple of months!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Take plenty of breaks when working on programming projects! In my experience, the longer I sit and stare at my screen while programming, the less productive I become. Try to force yourself to take a break regularly so you don’t get burnt out while working on projects!
