CS 373 Spring 2021 Week 3: Joseph Graham
- What did you do this past week?
This past week I spent a good amount of time working on the Collatz project as well as reading perusal texts (for both this class and other classes). I just finished the Collatz project on Friday and still plan on doing some more reading this weekend.
2. What’s in your way?
I found completing the Collatz project a little difficult, just by the sheer amount of information and steps involved in the workflow. Many procedures, such as GitLab issues, black, git log, pydoc, etc., were new to me, and as such needed to do a bit of research to understand what I needed to do. Though now I feel like I have a much better understanding of the workflow for this class, and as such will be much more prepared for the next project.
3. What will you do next week?
Besides the typical work involved each week, such as readings and quizzes, I assume I will be getting ready for the next project. I’m not sure when it will be released or when we will get in contact with our partners, but I’m sure I’ll be spending time soon contacting and getting to know my new group for project 2.
4. If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration?
I thought that the reading was great, as it gave me a better understanding of why CI/CD is used. It also gave me some exposure to other forms of CI and version control outside of Git and GitLab. Though I did notice that the article was showing its age when the author stated how Subversion is the current open source repository of choice, which I believe should nowadays be Git. I have never heard of Subversion!
5. What was your experience of Collatz?
Like I said above, Collatz was interesting, not necessarily because the code itself was difficult, but because of many of the workflow steps involved in integrating and turning it in. With that said, I actually really enjoyed learning about all these steps. I’ve always been kind of lost on how software engineers use these tools and felt like other classes never taught enough about git and other source control management techniques. I honestly wish I took this class before my last internship as what I’ve already learned from this first project would have been extremely helpful.
6. What was your experience of exceptions?
I’ve had some experience writing exceptions for my previous internship, but the lecture we had on Friday really helped me understand better why we use them. It makes a lot of sense when you compare it against the other options we can use, such as passing in an array or using a global variable, and how it’s inconvenient because the caller always needs to check these options. It makes much more sense to use exceptions because the caller is forced to pay attention.
7. What made you happy this week?
Getting finished with the Collatz project early! It’s due right before my girlfriend's birthday, so I’m happy I was able to have a productive week and efficiently get my work done in this class so we can spend some quality time together.
8. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is to invest in a good mechanical keyboard if you really want to up your typing experience. If you use a PC or multiple monitors, having a quality mechanical keyboard makes typing such a smooth and satisfying process. You will always know if you made a keystroke. You can even get a keyboard with crazy flashing lights if you’re into that thing.