CS371p Spring 2022: Week 5
What did you do this past week?
This past week, I continued working on my Socket programming project in Networks, which involved multi-threading and the need to use synchronization primitives. I also spent a good amount of time in my Syntax class for my linguistics degree, using LaTeX to draw trees for various English sentences, also getting a review on formal language theory as I learned in Compilers a few semesters ago.
What’s in your way?
Not much is in my way currently. My cut on my finger from last week has healed, so that has been nice. Just need to work on various assignments due this week.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will start working on the Voting assignment with my partner, hopefully making a good amount of progress on it. I will also need to work on a Data Mining project involving KNN and Naive Bayes classification. I will continue to make progress on my Networks project, as well as assignments in my various linguistics classes. As usual, I will continue my language learning hobby (recently hit a 60 day streak!).
What did you think of Paper #5: Single Responsibility Principle?
I think it is an interesting idea, but I feel like the notion of responsibility/reason is very arbitrary and hard to execute in practice. It seems like a way to create an excess of classes, which may make it more difficult to maintain. I will need to use it in practice to see its benefits, and I’m sure they will great considering the SRP is still touted by developers today.
What was your experience of l-values, r-values, pointers, and references?
I have done a good amount of low-level programming in various systems classes like Comp Arch, OS, Compilers, Virtualization, etc., so I was rather comfortable with pointers. References in C++ was a rather straight-forward notion to understand as well. I really enjoyed the in-depth explanation of l-values, r-values, and things like the pre-increment and post-increment operator. Dr. Downing explained it in a way that made it intuitive and to be able to form a mental model of the ideas. I think a solid understanding of these concepts will help with learning more advanced concepts later in the course.
What made you happy this week?
I was happy to meet up with many of friends this week, get food, study together, workout, etc. I’m also really stoked that one of our UT students is a finalist in the collegiate Jeopardy competition.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
If you ever want to re-learn linear algebra, a really good resource (from a former UT professor) is the following:
There are free video lectures as well an amazing PDF that can be used for practice/reference.
