CS371p Spring 2020: Ian Thorne (Post 3)

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I started working on the Collatz assignment. I didn’t get quite as far along as I would have liked, but I at least got the GitLab repo set up, along with issues, and a naive solution to the problem. Luckily, the GitLab setup was the part I was looking forward to the least, so now that’s that out of the way I should hopefully be able to finish everything else off without much stress.

What’s in your way?

A lot like last week, not a whole lot is in my way other than myself. At this point in the semester, I’m starting to get back into a rhythm with everything; now that my classes are all assigning things, I’ll need to start managing my time a little better to handle it all effectively.

What will you do next week?

Next week I’ll finish off the Collatz assignment by closing out all of my issues in my GitLab repo: implementing a more efficient solution with some sort of caching and debugging the errors I’ll no doubt run into. After that, I’ll definitely start the next assignment earlier than I did this one, if the next one gets assigned right away.

What was your experience of exceptions, references, and consts?

I’d seen exceptions a couple times in other classes, like the one hour C++ class, but I’ve never gone into this much depth about them. I didn’t realize you could throw any object, rather than just exception types, and I didn’t know how they worked with objects that inherit from other types. Between the C++ class and Dr. Gheith’s operating systems class, I was already pretty familiar with all the concepts we learned about references. Finally, I knew about some of the const concepts we learned about on Friday, but I’d never learned about the different types of read-write and read-only pointers (or paintball guns…).

What made you happy this week?

It snowed! In Texas! A couple of my friends and I went out and took pictures in the snow that night, which was a lot of fun (and responsible for me cutting my work time short on the Collatz assignment…), it remains to be seen if I’ll ever get those pictures back. In terms of coding, I was pretty happy to get all the GitLab setup work out of the way, so I can start getting down to business on the Collatz assignment.

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

After starting on the first Graphics assignment this week and setting up a GitHub repo for it, I would definitely suggest looking into gitignore files and learning how to make good ones. My partner and I didn’t set one up and now our repo is filled with garbage build files that we need to overwrite every time we pull from it. I’ll likely be spending some time this weekend re-engineering our repo so we don’t have to deal with this for the rest of the project. This actually extends to a lot of other things too: you should spend a little time learning about some things before jumping into them.