Oct 10: CS371p Fall 2020 Blog
This series of blog posts are assignments of my CS 371p course.
1. What did you do this past week?
This past week, I got food poisoned and was out for a day. Although it did not sound like much, I got quite a bit behind in a few classes, so I spent the past week catching up on schoolwork.
2. What’s in your way?
Schoolwork and applying for internships are in my way. The assignments and projects are taking up a large amount of my time, and from what I hear, it’s a bit tougher to get an internship this semester compared to previous ones.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week I will prepare for the test that is coming up and finish up the project. I’m still a bit confused by how my_allocator works, but I’m confident I’ll figure it out soon.
4. If you read it, what did you think of The Open-Closed Principle?
I thought it was a very good read and its Object-Oriented Design principles to be very applicable in software engineering. It had some very valuable insights, for example, a programmer must not only make a function work but also have to think about other concepts, such as scalability. The Open-Closed Principle states that source codes must be open to extension but closed to modification. One way of doing this is to use inheritance and create abstract classes that classes of similar functions inherit from (e.g. a Circle and Square class inheriting from a Shapes class).
5. What was your experience of iterator concepts, std::array, and std::vector? (this question will vary, week to week)
Although I had experience using iterators in Java, I found the iterators in C++ to be much easier to use as begin() and end() are very similar to pointers, and vectors are lists include methods such as insert and erase that takes in an iterator() as a parameter instead of having to use index. Similarly, I had experience in Java with array and vector but found its C++ counterparts to be more enjoyable and simple to use.
6. What made you happy this week?
I fixed a bug that’s been plaguing me for a while in the FRI stream that I chose to continue. It turns out that every line in a file had a space before a tab, and the space wasn’t supposed to be there. But since spaces are tabs are both empty, I did not find out that the spaces were there until now, which is both relieving and mildly frustrating.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is to not forget about exercising. This is a very difficult and busy period for a lot of us, and although exercising isn’t very high on the to-do list of programmers, it is very important to our health.
