CS371p Spring 2021 Entry 6: Dustan Helm

Dustan Helm
2 min readMar 1, 2021
  1. What did you do this past week?

I wasted the entire week off and did absolutely nothing productive, though this is not a marked change from my normal behavior. I regret nothing.

2. What’s in your way?

The main thing in my way is lack of motivation. Online school just can’t hold my attention or interest as well as traditional in person learning. I work best when I can physically separate work from my living space.

3. What will you do next week?

Catch up on all the stuff I should have done last week but put off because I had the opportunity to do so; that is, start the voting project, work on Computer Graphics, and prepare for the Career Fair.

4. If you read it, what did you think of the Single Responsibility Principle?

Isolating responsibilities to their own discrete units in a hierarchy is obviously good design for certain services, though I’m glad the paper mentions that needles complexity and infinite decoupling helps nobody in situations where disjoint separation of concerns is not appropriate.

5. What was your experience of Voting and consts? (this question will vary, week to week)

Consts are pretty straight forward and I already knew the semantic details of constant pointers compared to constant data, but I struggled on the quiz over voting because I misunderstood the ending steps of the algorithm presented in class, but it makes much more sense now.

6. How did you fare in the storm?

Though the roads in Fort Worth were taken out for days and there was still problems with water and power in certain areas, my neighborhood was mostly untouched. Ironically the only power outage I experienced was about a week before the storm, so call it luck, new equipment, or the tax bracket, but our household was lucky in that we were relatively unscathed, especially compared to the situation in Austin.

7. What made you happy this week?

I played a lot of blitz chess and got my rating up to above 900 after a month of decline, plus having an entire week off was really nice because leisure and idleness are my life’s true passions.

8. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Believe it or not procrastination on coding projects may not be the most valuable strategy for efficient or quality work.

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