CS371p Spring 2022: Week 4
What did you do this past week?
This past week I finished up on Collatz, did some UDP socket programming in my Networks class, and started my Data mining project on decision trees and K-fold cross-validation. I rewatched a show called Odd Taxi with my roommate, and I finished up Crash Landing On You, which was pretty wholesome.
What’s in your way?
I have several assignments all due this Monday, so I will need to focus to get all of them done. I also got a cut on my finger from cooking, which is now healing, but it is making it harder to type.
What will you do next week?
I will continue writing code for my P0P project in Networks and finish up the various other assignments in my other CS and Linguistics classes. I will also continue my language learning (currently at a 53-day streak for Anki), and I will soon be done with a beginner grammar deck. I also want to experiment with Wireshark and other tools in my Networks class.
What did you think of Paper #4: Pair Programming?
The paper was interesting and reinforced several ideas that will be useful for me this semester, as I am taking 3 CS courses that incorporate pair programming assignments. I think the idea of switching the driver and navigator roles every once in a while is a great idea to avoid the navigator getting unfocused.
What was your experience of exceptions and StrCmp?
Getting a refresher on exceptions was nice, having used them slightly in Java before. Dr. Downing did a great job explaining the utility of exceptions and why they were a better solution than checking return values of functions like in C. In addition, it would be nice to understand what overhead exceptions bring, as this might be critical in something like an embedded systems context. As far as the StrCmp exercise, while it was straight-forward, my team had trouble getting the tests to run (which took a lot of our time), and so we did not get a complete solution in time. It is interesting to see the various types of strings in C++ when declaring with, std::string, const char* and char[].
What made you happy this week?
My roommate and I decided to try Hello Fresh (not sponsored) this week, and we ended up cooking some great meals together. It was a step up from what we usually eat, and the initial weeks’ discounts made it super affordable for the time being. Can’t wait to experiment with more dishes!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
While a normal CS curriculum will teach you computer science fundamentals and some interesting applications in upper division classes, there are a handful of useful topics that are not taught in much detail, such as shell scripting, Vim, using the command line effectively, and version control. A nice free course to help learn these ideas is the following course taught at MIT:
