CS371p Fall 2020: Kent Hansen #3
- What did you do this past week?
This week I worked on implementing the initial solution to Collatz and adding a few optimizations. I also worked on adding in more unit and acceptance tests to ensure that my solution is correct at each point along the way.
2. What’s in your way?
What is in my way right now is figuring out how to implement the last few optimizations, particularly the cache. I want to try implementing the meta cache because I think it will produce the most efficient result. I need to make an initial attempt at implementing it but I am struggling a bit with how to go about generating the cycle length intervals and also how to determine what size intervals to cache.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week I will have turned in the Collatz project and I can get started on Project #2. I will make sure to take note of the concepts we cover in class as they will most likely factor into how to solve some of the issues in the second project.
4. What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)
Getting started with Collatz has gone pretty well. I have enjoyed getting used to the tools and the workflow and I feel like I am getting into the rhythm of development. The makefile has proven to be very helpful in running tests quickly and the starter code didn’t take too long to understand. I am having some issues with the caching optimizations but I expect that these can be worked out. Learning about exceptions helped me to understand how they actually function as previously I had simply used them as I was supposed to without knowing what happens under the hood.
5. What made you happy this week?
I went swimming at a park on the Colorado River that was luckily not very crowded this weekend and had a lot of fun. I haven’t gone swimming the entire summer and it was nice to do it again after so long.
6. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week for this week is Netlify, a web deployment service that I used for a website I have been building recently. It integrates very smoothly with the development framework I was using and deploying to the web only requires linking a GitHub repository and pushing the code. After that, every push to the repo triggers a new deploy so the live site is always up to date.