CS371p Fall 2020 Week 11: Abu-Zayd Abdullah
- What did you do this past week?
This past week I worked on and finished Darwin, I was having some weird behavior on some of the student tests because some of the autogenerated input files had duplicate creatures in the same positions on the board, which though not effecting the number of creatures on my board, was causing some of them to run twice due to my solution using sorting for efficiency. Once I realized that it was trivial to write a workaround that got me passing all the remaining student tests. I also managed to finish my current Network Security and Privacy lab in under a half-hour due to how relatively straightforward it was which was very refreshing.
2. What’s in your way?
Currently only final projects are in the way for me, though luckily from what I’ve heard the final projects in my other classes as well as this one are not as difficult as some of the earlier ones. Other than that this coming week should finally be a light one for me and allow to be able to focus on some extracurricular work I have been doing that I haven’t been able to give my full attention.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week I will work on the final project for this class as well as go over some of the vector exercises again to make sure I have a good understanding of how it works.
4. If you read it, what did you think of The Dependency Inversion Principle?
I found it to be an interesting read just like the reading from last week with its insightful advice about some of the mistakes we make sometimes with software design.
5. What was your experience of continuing to implement std::vector, move semantics, and allocators again?
The lectures about these topics made sense to me and I found some of the design decisions of C++ to be very interesting.
6. What made you happy this week?
I was finally able to finish up all the lingering work I had from midterms week and I should finally have a little more free time this week which I am very happy about.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil” -Donald Knuth. I learned this the hard way recently on a systems side project I’ve been working on, an optimization I had made early on in the project turned out to fail under one specific set of conditions I thought would never arise and lead to an error that took me the better part of a week to debug all for one line. However, this semester I have really learned the value of starting off with a simple working implementation.
