CS371g Summer 2021: Blog 3

• What did you do this past week?

This last week consisted of working on the Collatz project and another project for my Software Engineering class.

• What’s in your way?

During the Collatz project, I encountered a problem where my program was not passing some of the public tests ran by make run. I seriously could not figure out what the problem was as even when I removed my optimized implementation and only had the code in its bare bones. This part frustrated me when working on the project because the problem seemed so simple but kept failing. Finally, I took some time to read the errors are figured out that some numbers were too large for unsigned type causing some errors and a simple switch to long type fixed my problem.

• What will you do next week?

Next week, I will look to work on project 2 with my partner. It does seem a little daunting but I think once we get into the actual coding, the task will ease off a little bit. Hopefully, I will have some time to relax, unlike last week where I was occupied for pretty much the entire week.

• If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #3: Pair Programming?

After reading the paper, I mainly agreed with the points discussed. For one, I enjoy doing pair programming more than programming individually for the simple fact that pair programming allows you to bounce off ideas off of the other person. Also, the fact that there is another person to review your code while you code definitely helps avoid simple mistakes that would originally take some time to debug if it were not for someone being there.

• What was your experience of value vs. pointer vs. reference, and Incr? (this question will vary, week to week)

Before the class, I was confused about the difference between pointers and references. I knew that there was a difference but I was not clear about what that exactly was. In the class, I was able to visually see the difference in how the variables changed when initialized as a pointer and a reference. In the increment lesson, I was mainly familiar with the nature of pre-increment and post-increment but I found it kind of refreshing to learn it again.

• What was your experience of Boost Serialization and RMSE? (this question will vary, week to week)

Prior to this class, I have not heard of Boost Serialization; however, I found out that it could provide very useful for reading and writing data for our Netflix project. I did get a little lost on the specifics so I will have to go back to the notes and review what was covered so that I can be confident in it. Root mean square error I have heard of in my statistics and a couple of science classes. It was interesting to see how root mean square error comes back into play for this project.

• What made you happy this week?

This week, I was pretty happy to get my projects done for my summer classes because both ended up taking longer than anticipated. In the end, finally seeing them work as intended was pretty cathartic.

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

My tip of the week is something I learned last week from one of my partners from another class that I found useful for pair programming. If you use Visual Studio Code to code C++ or whatever language, there is an extension called “LiveShare Extension” which allows multiple people to collaborate on code simultaneously instead of just letting one person code and the other person watch. This was a much more efficient way to code and we were able to work on multiple blocks of code at once. I would recommend this tool (or something similar) for anyone who is doing pair programming.