CS371p Fall 2020: Stephen Zheng

The following is for blog entry #2 for CS371p.

1. What did you do this past week?
   I attended lectures and completed the in-class quizzes. I also learned about possible optimizations for the project during the lectures. In addition, I completed the in class exercises regarding test cases. Outside of class, I went over the C++ makefile on Perusall. I have started looking at the workflow and the overall project.
2. What’s in your way?
   Nothing really since I haven’t started working on the project except looking at it so far.
3. What will you do next week?
   I will start the project and ideally finish it all next week. I intend to pass all the test cases for the project by doing the optimizations professor mentioned in class.
4. What was your experience of assertions, Google Test, and gcov? (this question will vary, week to week)
   I did not have much experience of assertions, google test, and gcov at all before this. Based on the in class exercise and lecture, I was surprised that assertions are so ineffective. It is clear that in a real time project, assertions could cause bugs to slip by unnoticed. Gcov was very interesting to me, in that you can essentially see if entire portions of your code are untouched.
5. How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?
   I have been doing fine despite the quarantine/pandemic. Talking to my friends in online games has helped shorten the distance between us and keep my sanity intact.
6. What made you happy this week?
   One of my favorite esports teams, TSM, made it into the finals of the LCS tournament (for League of Legends), after a huge comeback in the previous series. It seems like they will win the finals as well.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
   For this week, I recommend using Scrapy if you are interested in making a complex, automated webcrawler. Based on my experience with it in the past, it takes webscraping to a whole other level, although there is a bit of a learning curve involved.