CS371p Fall 2020: Kent Hansen #2
- What did you do this past week?
This week I worked on setting up my development environment for Project 1 and getting familiar with GitLab, Docker, and the starter code. I worked through the first few steps in the workflow and I am getting ready to implement my initial solution to the Collatz problem. I spent some time getting familiar with GitLab issues and creating my first set of issues to pursue as I develop a solution. I read and became familiar with the Makefile, which has already helped me understand the various tools involved in the project and how to make use of the existing scripts to streamline development.
2. What’s in your way?
What stands in my way of making progress currently is my lack of familiarity with C++ and some of its differences from C. It took some time to understand what was going on in the starter code but now that I do, I can make progress to implement a solution and begin writing tests. I can also see that I need to understand the Google Test framework more deeply in order to be able to write more useful tests.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week I will begin implementing both the initial solution and the optimized solution. I will work on creating both unit tests and acceptance tests as well. I will continue to add GitLab issues as new bugs and features arise and get better at making meaningful commits that resolve those issues. Once I develop an initial solution, I will submit it to HackerRank to see how well it performs. After this, I will implement some of the optimizations we have discussed already in class in order to pass the subsequent HackerRank tests.
4. What was your experience of assertions, Google Test, and gcov? (this question will vary, week to week)
This week I worked on understanding the given tests in TestCollatz.cpp. I was able to run these tests and confirm their success and then modify them to match the expected output. Through running these tests, I became familiar with how Google Test outputs test passes and failures as well as how gcov measures test coverage. I haven’t added native C++ assertions to the code yet but as I implement my solution I will use these to check pre-conditions and post-conditions.
5. How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?
I am doing well and don’t feel too overwhelmed yet with school or with the state of the world. I feel like what has been most helpful for me in terms of support has been spending time with my family and having lots of open and meaningful conversations. This has helped me work through any stress or difficulties that arise in my life.
6. What made you happy this week?
I have been taking a Persian class this semester and I feel like I have learned a lot in just a week. It has made me happy to feel like I have learned a lot in such a short amount of time and the class has been a lot of fun so far.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is the geopandas library in python which I used for a project this summer for my internship. Geopandas is a tool which allows you to create and manage dataframes with geographical data such as latitude/longitude points, lines, polygons, and other features. It is useful for making visualizations of geographical data and for gaining all sorts of interesting insights into datasets with location information.