Sep 5, 2021
CS373 Fall 2021 Entry 2
1.What did you do this past week?
Drove home to hangout with my long time friends in Fort Worth and visit with my family for the long Labor Day weekend. Didn’t start Project 1 but I wrote pseudocode for the cached cycle length method (as well including the 2 steps on odd shortcut) so that I can implement it pretty quickly when I get the build environment up and running on my return to Austin.
2.What’s in your way?
Although I feel confident and ready for the academic year, I still find it very difficult to balance anything else on top of that, like maintaining club attendance, thinking about extra curriculars, or getting ready for the recruiting season.
3. What will you do next week?
I will get Project 1 started and completed, I’m pretty familiar with the general routine and practice of it from my experience in Object Oriented Programming this past spring.
4. If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #2: Makefile?
Again, my experience in OOP has proved pretty helpful here, as it looks pretty standard compared to a build file we would receive or adapt for ourselves from those C++ projects. I had a couple questions that I asked on Perusall about specific syntax things but they were answered pretty quickly by other students so my understanding is even better now.
5. What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, and coverage? (this question will vary, week to week)
The python unit test framework is almost identical to Google Test for C++ and so I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting that to work other than minor syntax differences. Assertions are pretty standard and also its pretty clear why unit test frameworks accomplish checks better than raw assertions that stop the world. Coverage makes sense though I’ve found that sometimes even with randomized testing data its hard to get some rare edge cases or redundancy checks to be covered.
6.What made you happy this week?
Seeing my friends at home and switching out of Latin 365 into Latin 323, which fits my schedule a lot better and isn’t nearly as grueling in pace or content.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is this article I was sent about the fundamentals of designing a chat bot, specifically in regards to design questions and applied in the context of Conversational Artificial Intelligence for banking:
