CS371p: Fall 2020 Week 4
What did you do this past week?
This past week, I pretty much just did work. I did, however, book my plane ticket back to Austin, so I’m pretty excited about that. As for this specific class, I began working on the Voting project. It’s a good thing I didn’t make too much progress, because Friday’s quiz showed me that I didn’t understand the input as well as I thought I did, and that would’ve been a nightmare to fix.
What’s in your way?
The biggest thing in my way for this class is the language C++ itself. It’s a pretty annoying language, in my opinion, and it would’ve been much easier to implement the project in Python or even Java. I’m not entirely sure why we’re learning C++ either, since both Python and Java support OOP, but it is what it is.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I plan to finish the Voting project and submit the Hackerrank. Unlike the Collatz project, I’m going to take my time with the flow and try to use test driven development to make this project, just to get better at the valuable skill (think XP, but for one person). It’ll be helpful with fulfilling the requirements, too, since I’ll actually be following them.
What was your experience of exceptions, voting, and strcmp?
I’ve always been a fan of exceptions. I recently read an article about “failing fast”, which emphasizes the use of exceptions over returning something like -1 or null on unexpected program behavior, and I thought it applied well to this class. I thought Voting was quite a challenging project to implement with object oriented programming, which is good, of course. Lastly, I liked strcmp because it gave me a quick refresher on pointers in C++.
What made you happy this week?
I was feeling pretty down about being quarantined and not being able to get enough work done, but I felt much better after I reminded myself that I’m only human and I can’t expect a ridiculous amount from myself out of the blue. I also tried the Cactus Jack burger from McDonald’s with a friend, so that was lit.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is to not beat yourself up if you’re not as productive as you should be. We’re humans, not robots, and can’t be expected to work at optimal efficiency all the time. I think it’s something that CS majors tend to forget, but it also applies to us the most, in my opinion.