CS 371p: Week 2

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I’ve worked on staying ahead on my assignments and trying to finish them before the day they’re due. Staying proactive and not being overloaded with numerous things last minute is important to me, so I’ve been making an effort in all my classes. For OOP, that means getting to the paper and blogs pretty soon after they’re posted, and starting the lab early. I’ve already cloned it and am looking to work on it over the next couple days!

What’s in your way?

At the moment, I can manage the workload of all my classes, but I think it will definitely be harder once all of them begin to ramp up. In this class, I can begin to already see it might be a bit harder with the addition of the new project. Over the past week in lectures, it was my first time learning about things like Docker, formally learning how to structure a Makefile, running Google Collatz tests, and generally a lot of good engineering practices. Since it’s one of my first encounters with them, I can see how it will add an extra layer of complexity to the project.

What will you do next week?

After my Concurrency lab is due, I’ll be focusing my efforts on the Collatz project for this class. I think it’s extremely worthwhile to explore the pipeline that we’ve been given — from test-driven development, to learning Docker, to understanding how the Makefile works, to developing our own unit and integration tests; all these skills are essential to good software engineering. I’m grateful that we have the opportunity to do so with this project, and that the content of cycle length itself isn’t incredibly difficult so we can focus more on the general process.

If you read it, what did you think of the Makefile?

I’ve had some minimal experience with Makefiles, and never fully understood most of the syntax in them (and never had to). I’m grateful for the annotations on what all the commands mean, and how extensive it is to make sure we’re able to see a lot of examples. It seems incredibly useful and will automate a lot of the compilation, cleaning up, and version checking for tools.

What was your experience of Docker?

I’d only heard of Docker before, but never used it.

What was your experience of assertions?

I’d used some assertions in Python, but never fully explored them in C++.

What was your experience of unit tests?

I had some experience writing them and knew what they were, but never with the automated test environment online with Google.

What made you happy this week?

It was such a beautiful day every single weekday this week! I wake up in the mornings to go to the gym, and it was so pleasant to feel the cold, crisp air on my skin while the sun’s ray gently warmed up the day. It was a big contrast to the previous week, where it was cloudy every day.

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

It’s really important to find things that you want to do for yourself. If there’s something interesting to you that you’d like to code up, go for it! I find that pursuing even small projects that I’m personally invested in reaffirm and refresh my passion and interest for the field, which can be forgotten from things like burn out and disinterest!