CS373 Fall 2021 Entry 3 Dustan Helm

Dustan Helm
2 min readSep 13, 2021

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What did you do this past week?

Started and finished the Collatz project for this class and drove back home again for the weekend after I hung out with some friends in Austin Friday night.

What’s in your way?

Still finding it very difficult to balance things on top of my class load even when I feel comfortable with the amount of work I’m having to do.

What will you do next week?

I have homework in other classes, like Data Mining, but until attending the CS373 lectures I don’t really have anything to work on for the class that I know about beforehand. So, I’ll likely get started on my Data Mining Assignment 1 while keeping up with readings for AHC 325 and my Latin class. I might also drive home to Fort Worth again next weekend to celebrate a friend’s birthday (which was actually this weekend but he was out of town for a family wedding).

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #3: Continuos Integration?

I’m pretty familiar with the process of Continuous Integration, especially through the projects we did in Object Oriented Programming last spring. Additionally, I think this was one of the Perusall papers we looked at then as well. I think Continuous Integration is a hugely helpful and important tool in a Software Engineer’s toolbelt but having already learned a lot about it I don’t think I necessarily got a huge amount out of it the second time around.

  1. What was your experience of IsPrime and Collatz optimizations? (this question will vary, week to week)

isPrime was pretty easy because its a very familiar algorithm. Having already done Collatz for OOP albeit in a different language, I found it pretty easy to implement the optimizations we discussed in Python.

What made you happy this week?

Hanging out with friends and seeing my family in Fort Worth again.

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

My tip of the week is to either use Docker or carefully examine all of your makefiles to avoid library versioning issues. The logic error in the Collatz makefile with pylint 3 on the lab machines gave me unnecessary grief because I didn’t want to figure out how to use Docker for this project.

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