CS371p Fall 2020 Week 2: Abu-Zayd Abdullah
- What did you do this past week?
I spent this week primarily with getting re-acclimated to taking classes. Over the summer 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 some of my free time working on some open source projects that I had started contributing to during this past summer. I also did some work on Collatz, starting off with following the workflow and fixing the tests. After that I wrote a naive solution and passed the first HackerRank test, then I wrote some optimizations using various caching schemes and managed to pass all three of the required tests. I also went ahead and submitted a merge request for the acceptance tests.
2. What’s in your way?
Not much, it is recruiting season so there is that to worry about as I need to start preparing.
3. What will you do next week?
I will probably submit Collatz as at the time of writing the Canvas assignment is not yet open, after doing that I’ll likely prepare for the next project as well as work on my lab for one of my other CS classes.
4. What was your experience of assertions, Google Test, and gcov?
I think assertions are incredibly usefully especially if there ever comes a time when your program misbehaves and you need to do debugging. I think that Google Test as framework is okay, though the fixture oriented testing features are nice the framework has some odd quirks related to equality that last I checked were known issues. In a similar vein I like the idea of coverage testing, though I’ve found at least in my own experience that coverage tools are not as practical for any kind of large codebase and they in my opinion tend to provide a superficial promise that all of your code is being tested on any such sufficiently complex project.
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 fine. My friends and family have been most helpful in terms of support.
6. What made you happy this week?
Being able to more or less get Collatz finished this past week made me happy.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Over the summer I watched a talk by Emil Bay that talked about password security related best practices and the talk explained iteratively how to make a progressively more secure system as well as highlighting some key security mistakes even large corporations have made. Here is the link to the talk.
