CS371P Fall 2020 Blog 9: Mason Eastman
What did you do this past week?
This past week I completed and submitted Allocator with my partner. Other than attending lectures, I also started on Darwin, and have my initial interfaces set up with some unit tests for them. I had a pretty standard week in my other classes.
What’s in your way?
In this class, currently nothing. I feel like I’ve made good progress on Darwin, and plan to keep that up! I have a chemistry exam and an algorithms exam this week, so I’ll have to devote some time to studying for them.
What will you do next week?
Next week I’ll attend lectures and keep working on Darwin. I hope to have it completed by the weekend, because my sister is coming down to visit me. Other than my two exams, my week shouldn’t be too busy, so I can devote my time to studying and working on Darwin.
If you read it, what did you think of Ethical CS?
I thought it was really interesting — enough for me to go a little over the word count for the summary! I’ve always been fascinated with politics, ethics, and why people act/think why they do, and so I enjoy reading and learning about it in my free time. I also recently watched the Social Dilemma, which talked a lot about some of these ethics issues in tech; most notably algorithm bias and algorithms with purposes to get users addicted — I think every professional computer scientist should takes an ethics course so that they can be conscious of their position in tech and how it can influence people’s lives.
What was your experience of lambdas, initializations, std::initializer_list, and std::vector? (this question will vary, week to week)
Learning about lambdas was interesting to me, since I have been exposed to them before but never really understood them enough to use in my own code. Now I think I have a much better understanding of them and how I should approach integrating them into my code. I feel familiar with vectors, having used them on previous projects in this class, but taking the time to talk about implementing them provided to be useful. Lastly, I have seen the curly-brace notation of initializing things before, but I didn’t know much more about it than that, so it’s nice to have some backdrop for another initialization technique.
What made you happy this week?
My girlfriend, my roommate, one of our friends and I watched the football game against Baylor on Saturday — afterwards my girlfriend and I picked up Hopdoddy’s, which was really good. I also watched Borat 2 with some good friends on Friday night, and Borat never disappoints.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week is to go outside to code every now and then; as much as I love sitting inside with my comfortable office chair and RGB keyboard, now that it’s getting nicer and cooler outside, I plan on taking my laptop and getting more coding and work in general done in the fresh air. Changing your workspace can help your ideas flow, especially when your’e stuck!
