CS371g Summer 2020: Andrew Yin

What did you do this past week?

I worked on my Collatz project and gained a lot of helpful knowledge about git and continuous integration in the process. While, as Professor Downing said, it did seem a little excessive (I spent probably 40 minutes actually coding and many hours figuring out all the tools and finishing the requirements), I think I learned a lot of useful information about what it’s like to program in a work environment.

What’s in your way?

I’m a little burned out from working on assignments and taking classes solely at home, and it’s a little difficult for me to start on projects. I’m also a little tentative on how to start the Netflix project. It’s a little annoying to have to stay at home all day, but at least my family is all healthy and well.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I’m planning on starting the Netflix project. I’ve thought about it a little, and I think I’ll benefit from working with someone, so I might try to find a partner if anyone else is available.

What was your experience of exceptions, consts, and Boost serialization?

I thought it was really interesting. Learning the nuances of consts was very helpful, and I thought it was cool that there were const pointers and pointers to const values. It was also useful to learn about catching exceptions and to put the more specific catch statement first. I still don’t know much about Boost, so I can’t really say much, but I think it’s cool how it compacts data to read and write faster.

How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?

I’m doing okay. As I said above, motivation is a pretty big problem for me right now, but so far I’ve managed. It’s been helpful talking to my friends over video chat and playing video games and such.

What made you happy this week?

My code for Collatz worked on my first try, so that was pretty cool.

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

My friend recently introduced me to VSCode, and I’ve been using it with the SSH extension to work on my projects. It’s extremely helpful since it lets me SSH into the CS computers and provides a file explorer, editor and a terminal to help with my work. It also has lots of useful tools and C++ syntax correction