CS371P 2020: Week 4

What did you do this past week?

This week I started looking over Project 2, Voting. I haven’t started it yet since I had a few exams in my other classes, but I’m ready to really start working on it this week.

What’s in your way?

I’m a little worried about setting up the CI pipeline and makefile, but I know that I just need to sit down and figure it out — it probaby won’t be as rough as I’m anticipating. Besides that, the only thing in my way is that I haven’t found a chance to get started. I spent most of this weekend doing assignments for my other classes, and grading projects for the class I’m TAing.

What will you do next week?

Now that I have the work for my other classes out of the way, I’ll dive into Voting. I’m hoping to get most of it done during the week, but we’ll see how that goes.

What was your experience of Project #1: Collatz (the problem, the overkill requirements of submission, etc.)?

I really enjoyed Collatz. At first the workflow looked overwhelming, but reading the makefile and going to lab hours cleared things up pretty quickly. I spent a few days trying to figure out how to submit on HackerRank (something that actually turned out to be simple), and that slowed me down a little bit, but the project as a whole was relatively painless.

The submission requirements really did seem like an overkill, and I’m still wondering if I did everything correctly. However, after doing everything once I think Voting will be a lot smoother.

What made you happy this week?

I got new color changing smart lights for my room! They were a hassle to put up (picture: me in heels standing on a step stool still struggling to reach the ceiling) but now they look really cool.

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

Up until yesterday, Sublime text + the command line was my favorite way to program. Thanks to a group of my friends, I am now a VSCode convert. One really cool thing about VSCode is the live share extension, which is similar to codeshare but lets you run things too.