CS371p Spring 2021: Week 4

Blog Post 4

1. What did you do this past week?

I finished up the collatz project and spent most of the rest of the week working on either my Algorithms class or the project in the Networking class.

2. What’s in your way?

Mostly the Network project. It is due Monday and I need to focus on it before moving on to doing other homework I have in other classes. Also the cold… I was planning on going grocery shopping earlier this week but it seems like I’ll be eating canned food for a while until the ice melts.

3. What will you do next week?

Finishing the Network project is my main goal. After that I would like to catch up on reading assignments or homework I have in other classes.

4. If you read it, what did you think of the Pair Programming?

Honestly I am skeptical. I hear a lot of good things about it and can see how it can be beneficial, but I also feel like having someone hovering over your shoulder would be distracting. That being said I have never really tried it before and wouldn’t be against giving it a shot.

5. What was your experience of operators, pointers, and references? (this question will vary, week to week)

I have had some experience of them before in previous classes (either taught in class or naturally came across/looked them up doing projects). I think it is very cool and handy how you can directly mess with pointers and references in C. I am currently doing a project in python and have come across multiple instances where I wish I could just manually handle the pointers/references.

6. What made you happy this week?

I made some tomato curry and it turned out really good. I think I will be making it instead of regular curry from now on.

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

I’m late to the party, but I tried out VS code’s debugger and it was handy/cool. I had mostly been using GDB whenever I wanted to debug code, but VS code makes it easier to add breakpoints and such. It also has a separate window open showing all the variables and call stacks. It was very cool being able to step through a program and see everything be updated as the program continued. I used it in the collatz project to debug various bugs in my code.