CS371p Fall 2020: Stephen Zheng

The following is for blog entry #9 for CS371p.

What did you do this past week?

I finished the Allocator project with my partner, Kevin Gao. We found the project much harder than the previous one, Voting. Personally, I felt like there was much more places to make tiny syntax errors that would hold you back for hours. As far as the logic went, it was relatively straightforward, like how Downing had explained in class for allocate and deallocate. However, it did take us a few takes to understand the sentinels and minimum allocatable size. Outside of the project, I also attended the lectures and took the daily quizzes this week.

What’s in your way?

Nothing for now. We have a shorter time frame for project 4, so I need to find a partner for it ASAP.

What will you do next week?

As I mentioned above, I probably will get started on project 4. I will look for a partner within the next week. After that, I intend to get started with the actual project, including setting up the gitlab repo, issues, etc., and taking a further look at the project assignment.

If you read it, what did you think of Ethical CS?

I did not have time to read the paper this week.

What was your experience of lambdas, initializations, std::initializer_list, and std::vector?

I was already pretty familiar with lambdas. As for the other three, I had known about them but not gone that far in depth. I found the initializer list syntax a bit convoluted with all the different ways you could do it. For vector, I think I have a fair understanding of it, except the initializer list for it. I am waiting for Downing’s review of the my_vector on Monday to complete my understanding.

What made you happy this week?

One thing that made me happy this week was I received some free homemade brownies from a friend.

Also, Suning made a pretty crazy and entertaining upset vs Top Esports at Worlds this week.

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

For this week, I would recommend getting a decent webcam for video interviews. After I switched from my laptop camera to a simple $20 camera from Amazon, I look a lot clearer on screen and more focused. A pretty good investment to make if you are trying to make a good impression on these remote interviews.