CS371p Spring 2021 Entry 3: Dustan Helm
3 min readFeb 6, 2021
- What did you do this past week? I forked the repo and invited the graders to my GitLab, but most of my focus outside of lectures was on other homework I had this week with sooner deadlines, as well as getting a jump start on my RayTracer project for Computer Graphics (which is written in OpenGL, in C++!).
- What’s in your way? Chronic procrastination is in my way, but also lots of stress from the upcoming career fair and trying to get an internship, find housing, and keep my grades up.
- What will you do next week? Though my time will likely still be split with Computer Graphics this weekend, I hope to get the simplest solution to the problem and the 2 earliest optimizations from class implemented in the next day or two. Once that and all the bureaucratic setup ground work is taken care of, I’ll hopefully have Monday and most of Tuesday (because my class load is lighter T/TH) to implement some mixture of meta caching and basic memoization.
- If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration? Though its an interesting read, I think the most helpful evidence in favor of the usage of Continuous Integration to me comes from my own firsthand experience. In the Operating Systems final project, we saved all our code integration until the very end because many teams started later than we would have liked and it was an absolute mess that kept us up until 5 AM the night before it was due.
- What was your experience of Collatz? I’ve heard of the Collatz Conjecture before on various occasions, so I’m glad that the problem we have to solve has a little more depth than just calculating cycle length. I’m worried about how sophisticated the caching implementation will have to be in order to pass the stress tests on HackerRank, but I trust that it won’t be too unreasonable and maybe we’ll talk about optimizations some more on Monday.
- What was your experience of exceptions? I’ve seen exceptions before, though I’ve dealt with them much more heavily in Java than C++. I like plain C a lot, so I might be slightly pre-biased to not use them but I appreciate their usefulness in catching user error, bugs, and general inconsistencies without the jarring shutdown effect of an assert statement.
- What made you happy this week? Technically it was kind of last week but Weezer’s album OK Human came out and it made me happy because they rarely release good music nowadays and its actually a good album.
- What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? My pick of the week is TypeScript. Even though we didn’t end up using it for Computer Graphics like our professor had originally planned, I feel that it is worthy of mention because regular JavaScript is frankly a lawless nightmare.
