CS371p Spring 2021: Week 5

Blog Post 5

1. What did you do this past week?

I spent most of last week finishing up a project I had in another class as well as doing chores I had put off because of the snow.

2. What’s in your way?

Projects and tests in other classes. Deadlines have been extended after the snow storm, but now they are more piled together now in this past week/next week.

3. What will you do next week?

I would like to get started on the voting project after a test in another class earlier in the week. Since we do not have starter code this time, I am worried the project will be harder and take longer to complete and hope to get started as early as I can.

4. If you read it, what did you think of the Single Responsibility Principle?

I think it is a good but hard principle to follow. It makes sense and is easy to see when reading an article about it or with hindsight, but I often end up putting everything related to a class/object in that class. It is usually only afterwards when I need to change the class do I realize the mistake and have to refactor.

5. What was your experience of Voting and consts? (this question will vary, week to week)

I have not yet started voting, but I understand the concept. I am most worried about setting up the project, getting input to work properly, and optimizations.

Although constants don’t provide any new functionality, they are handy to keep from accidentally changing things you don’t mean to. I had not thought of passing parameters as constants to another method as a way of preventing that method from altering the value.

6. How did you fare in the storm?

I was pretty lucky in that I only lost power early on when it first started freezing. Some of my relatives were out of power for multiple days and had to use their fireplace, boil water with portable camping stoves, etc. in order to stay warm.

7. What made you happy this week?

The temperature finally warming up. I was worried all the ice weighing down on the trees would break the branches and cause damage to the house/car.

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

I learned about event loops while working on another class’ project. I was using a lot of asynchronous code as well and it was pretty confusing, but it was a cool alternative to making/running different threads.