Week 4

• What did you do this past week?

I wrapped up the remaining tasks that surrounded the Collatz submission, and confirmed I was on top of everything with a visit to Professor Downing’s office hours. Hopefully, I did not miss anything!

We covered arrays in this week’s lectures along with an overview of the next project – Voting. As usual, Professor Downing’s lectures are filled with useful information and he guides to a deeper understanding of the language itself. His method of teaching is quite impactful in helping students grasp the fundamental concepts behind each topic he is covering. I enjoyed learning about arrays work under the hood in C++, and I can imagine we will have more iterator stuff coming up soon.

The next project seems … okay, conceptually. I am sure there will be several issues when doing the actual implementation. The tough part of this project will again, the various tasks surrounding the program itself. We have to build our own test and run harnesses, as well as our own .yml and make files.

I also attended the 2nd UTPC and definitely myself a bit better than the 1st time. I recommend it to all.

• What’s in your way?

I had a reasonably successful, albeit busy week last week. I think I just have to be careful with time management and burnout. I am taking 3 CS UDE’s while working, so I need to ensure I stay on top of my responsibilities.

• What will you do next week?

I have an exam in one of my other CS courses, so I will study for that and hopefully get the implementation of the project itself completed. If I do accomplish that, I can spend the following week working on the extraneous tasks of the project.

• What was your experience of Project #1: Collatz (the problem, the overkill requirements of submission, etc.)?

I do not mind it. I understand the point of it, and appreciate the overkill nature of the work surrounding the project(s). It gives us a more holistic understanding of development in the real world as well as exposing us to more tools and technologies.

• What made you happy this week?

I received 2 full time offers and had a successful week work-wise. My long distance girlfriend is also visiting for 3 weeks.

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

https://sidewaysdictionary.com/#/term/http – this is a cool site which has easy to understand explanations of technical terms. I find it a useful way to learn how to explain some concepts to a layman.