CS371p Fall 2020: Stephen Zheng

The following is for blog entry #4 for CS371p.

What did you do this past week?

Early in the week, I finished the Collatz assignment. This included passing all the test cases and closing all the issues, which included formatting the code, creating a git log, etc. I implemented a couple of easy optimizations and both a lazy and meta cache, but I ultimately removed the meta cache since there was an unknown bug in it. Luckily, I had included enough optimizations to pass all the test cases anyways. Outside of the assignment, I also attended most of the lectures and took the daily quizzes.

What’s in your way?

Nothing serious, for now. I need to communicate with my partner so we can get started on thinking about project 2.

What will you do next week?

I will talk with my partner and we will probably get started with brainstorming or the workflow for project 2. I also will probably spend a portion of the week committed to applying to jobs and preparing for career fair.

What was your experience of exceptions, voting, and strcmp?

What I got out of the lecture for exceptions was that they are pretty useful for redirecting improper user input and preventing the program from immediately crashing when the user does something that is not handled by the program. The voting project seems like it is a nice step up from Collatz, that is somewhat similar in work but requires a bit more thinking for the algorithm. I don’t have much experience about strcmp because I missed the lecture on Friday (on the bright side, I had a three day weekend).

What made you happy this week?

I caught up to The Boys and can’t wait for the next episode to come out. Also, I had some Gong Cha for the first time in 6 months, and it was probably the best tap I’ve had in years. They didn’t even have regular pearls, but I had white pearls instead and was pleasantly surprised.

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

Try running a disk defragmenter program if your computer is slowing down and you have had it for a while. It might help speed up read/writes.