CS371g Summer 2020 Week 6: Abu-Zayd Abdullah
- What did you do this past week?
This past week I worked on finishing and optimizing the Integer project. I was not personally able to optimize it enough to pass the final test, though I am happy that I was able to implement and learn more about Karatsuba and more efficient ways of doing arbitrary precision arithmetic operations such as exponentiation.
2. What’s in your way?
Right now the Deque assignment is in my way, I have read a lot of evaluations from previous years that talked about this assignment, so I am trying to start early to make sure I give myself enough time to finish it.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week I will continue working on Deque, I’ll also likely try to find time to work on a few of my side projects that I did not have time to give my full attention last week.
4. What was your experience of vector and deque nature?
I understood how they work and understood a lot of the reason for the way they were designed the way they were in the standard library, though I’ll admit having worked with higher level languages mostly recently I definitely notice the difference in the amount of code needed.
5. How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?
I am doing okay, I am struggling with burnout for pretty much the first time as I’ve kind of overcommitted myself between contributing to a project for one of the reverse engineering groups I am a part of and classes I have found it a bit of a struggle to manage my time and still be motivated to work. However, I am hopeful I’ll get over it I might just need to consider taking some time off the personal project.
6. What made you happy this week?
I had a Zoom call with a lot of my friends from high school and it was nice catching up and checking up on each other.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Building cross-platform GUIs is very hard if you decide to try going native, you either have to accept a few compromises with a framework that may not be mature or stable, be willing to accept highly restrictive licenses for certain commercial ones, or build seperate dedicated applications using native frameworks like WinForms for Windows and SwiftUI for macOS. However, after doing a lot of research I’ve personally found the sweet spot for cross-platform GUIs to be web based ones, granted you’ll need to do some more work designing the UI and it will likely not look native, these are by far the simplest option. They also allow you to maintain one codebase for all platforms and often have well-backed open source with extensive documentation.
