CS371p Fall 2020: Sarvesh Kalwit
What did you do this past week?
This past week, I basically played a lot of catchup. All the classes that I’m taking are different than what I started the fall semester out with. However, they’re all pretty great classes and I’m excited to learn in them. Other than that, I’ve been wrapping up some side projects, and I plan to start recruiting once I’m done.
What’s in your way?
The biggest thing in my way, in honesty, is working from home. It’s pretty tough for me to get working when I’m constantly being distracted, but I’m somehow managing to make it work. Other than that, I’m still working on my time management skills, so that I can finish more stuff without putting it off.
What will you do next week?
By next week, I should be caught up in all my classes. With that done, I can breathe a pretty big sigh of relief. After that, I plan to, as I said before, finish up my side projects, update my resume and Linkedin, and start recruiting. I’m planning to go to the McCombs career fair as well — I’m not sure exactly why, but I feel like there might be some decent opportunities for technical majors (they did say it’s open to all majors, and it must be for a reason), and if nothing else, I’ll still be able to practice my professional elevator pitch, and maybe some behavioral interview skills.
What was your experience of assertions, Google Test, and gcov?
I was pretty “meh” about the last two. I’ve been writing code much more carefully recently, and especially with functional paradigms in mind (which I encourage any developer to read about — it makes debugging code much easier), so I don’t really like testing. Actually, testing is probably hated by all developers. Still, I was happy to see some software to make the process easier. I thought assertions were great to learn about, since — when used properly — they can help you pinpoint where your code went wrong pretty easily.
How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?
I’ve been holding up decently well. Of course, seven months stuck at home likely doesn’t do most people any good, but I’ve been managing. I might even get to come visit my friends in Austin in a month, so that’s cool. The thing that’s been the most helpful for me is definitely exercise. It really helps me get my mind off things and release all the pent up energy I have from sitting in my room all day.
What made you happy this week?
My family and I had a barbecue last night, and it made me happy.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Look into functional programming! Even if the language you’re working with isn’t a functional programming language, you can definitely make use of functional programming paradigms to make your code better. The irony is that we’re in Object-Oriented Programming, so the two styles will probably clash a lot, but it will definitely be a rewarding experience if you implement this outside of this class.
