CS371p Spring 2022: Week 13
What did you do this past week?
Last week, I conducted my Hindi speech experiment and got the results, I finished up the buffer bloat lab for Networks, and work for a little bit on the final Data Mining project. I also had registration this week, and for CS, currently I’m signed up for NLP and Programming for Performance. I was considering the security class, but it was a tough call. I may decide to sign up for a grad class later on as well.
What’s in your way?
Nothing is really in my way currently. These last two weeks are probably going to be a little busy will final projects and some exams, so it’ll be a grind. Pollen is getting a little better I think.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will get started on the Life project so I can knock that out of the way. I will also work on a Network measurements lab, and start the association analysis assignment in Data mining. I will also start writing the draft of my paper for the speech experiment I conducted.
What did you think of Paper 13. What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You?
I thought it was an interesting read, quite different from the technical papers that we were assigned for the past several weeks. I think it highlighted the struggles of women and minorities in academia and in the workplace, and did a good job bringing up the issues they face. The fact that this paper was published so recently shows that the CS community has some work to do in terms of how we treat each other. I also liked how it gave particular actions one could take to mitigate these societal issues.
What was your experience of r-value references, move constructor, and move assignment?
I had seen r-values references before, but I didn’t really understand their utility, but learning about move semantics and how moving can be used to optimize certain copy operations was interesting. In addition to learning about std::move, the move constructor and move assignment, it was interesting to see compiler optimizations like copy elision and move elision. Becoming super comfortable with copy and move semantics will definitely take some practice.
What made you happy this week?
My friends and I did some travel planning for the summer, so that was pretty exciting. Also my friend got into IIM Bangalore (the place where 3 Idiots was shot) for grad school, which is super hard to get into.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
A good tool to help understand the internals of C++ or any compiled language is a compiler explorer like the one I’ve linked below. You can mess around with different compilers, optimization levels, and you can see how your source code gets translated into machine code, understanding how different keywords and language features actually work.
