CS371P Fall 2020 Blog 11: Mason Eastman

What did you do this past week?

This week I went to lectures, and finished Darwin. Somehow, an idea popped into my head while watching the election coverage on Tuesday which ended up fixing the last bug in my project haha. My other classes have been pretty relaxed this week, so I spent the extra time getting ahead on some things and chilling.

What’s in your way?

I’d say nothing currently. I’ll be assigned a week long test in my vector calculus class on Friday, which I am not looking forward to. My club has our last main event of the semester on Tuesday, so I’m a little stressed as we finish preparing for that, but I think in the end it’ll go great.

What will you do next week?

Next week I’ll do my best to get ahead on this last project, and on work in my other classes. I’ll attend lectures and continue to look over the material we’ve covered, particularly the vector implementation from class.

If you read it, what did you think of The Dependency Inversion Principle?

I thought it was interesting! It was a good look at how to structure good designs for the overall long-run of code keeping it general and reusable, instead of the short term functionality, risking it becoming too hyper-specific.

What was your experience of continuing to implement std::vector, move semantics, and allocators again? (this question will vary, week to week)

I thought the vector implementation using allocators was particularly interesting. It’s cool that there’s a lot that happens behind the scenes to make sure that things get optimized, even if we can’t see it directly. The move semantics were a little foreign to me, but I think with a little time I’ll be able to understand.

What made you happy this week?

My club, EGaDS, recently welcomed some Junior Officers into the fray, and us officers had a mini virtual social with them over the weekend. It was a lot of laughing and fun, and it made me happy how much they care about the club and it’s success.

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

My tip of the week is to check your detailed pipeline output when you fail one on GitLab. By poking around I realized you can see exactly the CI command caused the pipeline to fail, and what the terminal output was. By doing that, I was able to find out that one of my failed Darwin pipelines was not due to an issue in my code, but in the makefile itself. Saved me some time and frustration since I could quickly locate the error and fix it, curing the pipeline.