CS373 Fall 2020 Blog #3

What did you do this past week?

This past week I worked on the Collatz project (and HackerRank), as well as did some work for my other courses. I also started looking into some tools like .NET core and .NET Framework.

What’s in your way?

I’m just trying to balance my time properly between working on assignments/projects for school and applying for internships, or preparing for interviews. It does help that preparing for technical interviews kind of goes hand in hand with some of my programming assignments though.

What will you do next week?

Next week I’ll hopefully spend some time trying to get ahead in my other classes, and also apply to more internships for next summer.

What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)

My experience of Collatz was king of long but also rewarding at the end. To begin, I spent a whole lot of time trying to pass the Hacker Rank tests. Played around with both recursive and iterative solutions, and several different combinations of optimizations. I eventually got one to work, so I’m sticking with that code. The starter code was fairly straight forward, I liked that there was a skeleton file to work off of. I still don’t understand all components of the makefile, but I think I know enough to get by. I actually found some of the optimizations for the Collatz problem very cool, but I did end up wasting a decent chunk of time playing around with meta caching, which I did not end up using. I think the idea of exceptions is pretty cool, and very useful for large software engineering projects.

What made you happy this week?

I’m so happy the NFL is back. Love this time of year.

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

One tool I’ve used in the past and really like is Circle CI. It is a tool for continuous integration, and it is great because it shows exactly where errors occurred if some of the integration tests failed.