CS371p Spring 2020: Safin Kasturi

What did you do this past week?

Last week I finished an essay for the second portion of my culture course’s exam, I had a quiz for my business law class, and I got started on the Allocator project. It took me a little while to understand the concept, but I think I’ve got it now.

What’s in your way?

I wrote some code on hacker rank that passes sample tests 0 and 3, but fails 1 and 4, and seg faults on 2. Of course, since we can’t see the hacker rank tests, it’s impossible to debug these. I don’t quite know how to run tests using the real allocator, so I’ll either have to figure that out and then compare it with my own allocator’s results, or just look through my code and try to figure out what is wrong.

What will you do next week?

Next week I’m going to try and finish the allocator project. I also plan to get caught up on my artificial intelligence course’s lecture material. Also, since it’s spring break, I want to spend some time relaxing and watching movies with my family.

If you read it, what did you think of the Liskov Substitution Principle?

I thought the LSP paper was a pretty good read. I like that it built on the open closed principle from last week. I also learned a couple of new things about structuring inheritance and polymorphism.

What was your experience of heap arrays, allocators, and digits iterator? (this question will vary, week to week)

I thought the digits iterator and the heap array were both fairly straightforward, yet I wasn’t previously that familiar with them. The allocator I’ve seen in my computer architecture and operating systems courses, so in theory I’m quite familiar with it. However I don’t really understand why we are using two integer sentinels per block as opposed to just one.

What made you happy this week?

This week I got to see Roger Federer make his return to the tennis court and play for the first time in over a year, so that was awesome. Unfortunately he lost in his second round, but I’m just hoping he can come back stronger for the rest of the season.

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

My pick of the week is unrelated to this course, as it relates to scraping data from API’s to obtain data. In Python, you can read from API’s using just a couple of imports and just a few lines of code, which makes things very easy.