CS371g Summer 2020 Week 2: Abu-Zayd Abdullah

1. What did you do this past week?

I spent this past week primarily with getting re-acclimated to taking classes. Over the brief break between the end of the last semester and the beginning of this one I had gotten used to not doing homework and waking up late though the latter is something I am working on. I also have spent a fair bit of my spare time refactoring some old projects and adding testing to some of my old C++ projects. I also created several issues on GitLab, wrote a naive solution for Collatz and then rewrote it with optimizations, submitted it to HackerRank and added some basic documentation.

2. What’s in your way?

I have been pretty busy, so I have not been able to finish up Collatz though I do have a working solution that passes the HackerRank tests. Other than that, not much else.

3. What will you do next week?

I have to finish up Collatz (e.g. documentation, filling in the README, adding the git log etc.).

4. What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, pointers, and references?

Already having some experience with C++ I already knew about a lot of what was covered. However, the discussion about lvalues and rvalues was new and quite interesting to me.

5. How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?

Things have been interesting with the current state of things, having Zoom meetings with friends and being around family has been helpful for me in terms of support.

6. What made you happy this week?

Starting this class and getting back into learning about C++ made me happy. I haven’t been able to use C++ in any of my recent coursework so taking a class where I can learn about C++ and apply it has been very nice.

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

I recently watched this very informative talk by Emil Bay that discussed best practices with regards to password security and showed progressively better and better ways to make a more secure system as well as showing some key mistakes made by even large corporations. Here is the link to the talk.