CS371P Fall 2020 Blog 5: Mason Eastman
What did you do this past week?
This past week I worked a lot on the second project. Because of my club’s game jam, and a massive Vector Calculus weekend exam, I unfortunately wasn’t able to start this project until last Tuesday. Because of my weird schedule I decided to work by myself on this project. Other than that I attended lectures, had our weekly officer meeting for my club, and took care of work in my other classes.
What’s in your way?
I don’t think the project has been particularly difficult, but I am currently struggling with an error in my logic — some elections are correct, while others I cannot tell where they are going wrong. Once I iron that out I’ll be well on my way to completing the project on time.
What will you do next week?
Next week I’ll finish up this project, attend the lectures, and start identifying trouble spots that I’ll need to study extra for the first HackerRank exam. I have an algorithms test earlier in the week, so I’ll start studying once I’m through that. My other classes will have a pretty standard week, and for my club, we’re going to be recruiting junior officers soon, so I have to prep a sign-up form and figure out how I’ll conduct interviews once it comes to that.
What was your experience of values, addresses, references and consts?
Before talking about them in class, I knew how to use values, pointers, addresses, and consts in practice, but it was really nice to have in-depth discussions about the differences between them, when to use what, and how the placement of the const keyword determines what is actually being kept constant. As for references, these were completely new to me — even though they use the &, I think of them differently than say, getting the pointer to a literal in C with the same &. References seem highly useful, and I’ve been putting them to work in my implementation of project 2.
What made you happy this week?
On Thursday I cooked a really yummy dinner with my girlfriend, and then we baked some cookies; It was also my dad’s and brother’s birthdays this weekend, so I decided to drive home to celebrate with them!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is this YouTube video from Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++. It’s almost a decade old, but it popped up in my recommended videos the other day, and it’s interesting. He discusses his reasoning for creating C++ and the advantages it has over other programming languages. Essentially, he explains that he thought it would be great to have a language that was as fast and robust at a low-level as C, but that could also use some of the higher-level paradigms of early Object-Oriented; so he made one!
