CS371p Fall 2020: Stephen Zheng

The following is for blog entry #5 for CS371p.

What did you do this past week?

I attended lectures and took the daily quizzes. I also started working on Project 2, Voting, with my partner. We created our own gitlab repository, invited the graders to the repository, and created issues for the project. Then, we copied common files from Collatz, such as the readme, makefile, etc., so that we could edit them to suit our needs for this project.

What’s in your way?

We are stuck messing around with reading the input. So far, we used the TestCollatz as a base, and have edited some of the code to better fit our input. However, we aren’t sure if we need to maintain the same structured format, where the read is separated from eval and separated from solve. Also, I have some scheduling conflicts with my partner, so we are trying to find more time to work on the project together.

What will you do next week?

I intend on finishing the voting project with my partner. This includes finishing up the I/O, passing all the HackerRank test cases, formatting the code, creating the git log, creating and merging our own test cases in to the public git repository, and submitting the assignment. Also, I intend on attending the lectures and doing the daily quizzes. Additionally, I’ve been procrastinating on this, but I might look into learning how to set up and use docker.

What was your experience of values, addresses, references and consts? (this question will vary, week to week)

To be honest, I found the addresses/references pretty confusing. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around all the differences between incrementing pointers, or their values, and whether they are consts or not, etc. I understand these concepts a lot better after attending the lectures this week.

What made you happy this week?

I bought some fresh fruit at Target and plan on making a strawberry banana smoothie some time this week. Also, a new episode of The Boys came out and it was spicy.

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

Common website, but try leetcode.com if you want to prepare for coding interviews. Has a better collection of questions than HackerRank, in my opinion.