CS 371p Fall 2020: Kent Hansen #4
- What did you do this past week?
This past week I worked on finishing the Collatz project. I ran into some issues optimizing my solution in order to pass the third test but I finally was able to implement a lazy cache with recursion that ended up passing the tests. Apart from that, my partner and I got started with the Voting project and we made some initial progress setting up the repo and looking at the issue of reading in input.
2. What’s in your way?
One thing in my way for the Voting project is figuring out how to correctly parse each test and account for the nature of the input files. Another issue I need to be mindful of is allotting enough time to work on the project while managing my other tasks for my on-campus jobs and other assignments, especially now that I need to coordinate when to work with my partner.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week I will work with my partner on solving the test input issue and implementing at least the simplest solution to the vote calculation problem. We plan on working a little bit each day to break up the project into more manageable pieces rather than trying to do it all before the deadline.
4. What was your experience of exceptions, voting, and strcmp? (this question will vary, week to week)
My experience so far with starting the voting project has been good. We haven’t run into anything too difficult yet and it feels like we can start to make good progress. The lecture about exceptions and strcmp helped me understanding how those two features of C++ work at a deeper level and I even ended up thinking about whether to use strcmp or == when comparing strings in the Voting project.
5. What made you happy this week?
This week I went for a hike at Wild Basin, a nature preserve off of 360. The weather was really nice in the morning and the park limits the number of visitors so it was very calm which made it a very enjoyable hike.
6. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week for this week is a video I stumbled across on YouTube of a lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup explaining the history of C++ and some fundamental features of the language. The video turned out to be very informative and gave me a greater appreciation for the origins of the language and why it is designed the way it is.