CS371p Fall 2020 Week 5: Abu-Zayd Abdullah
- What did you do this past week?
This past week I began working on Project 2: Voting with my partner, we managed to get our repository set up and got part of the I/O done. I also started working on a lab for one of my other CS classes.
2. What’s in your way?
Nothing in particular is in my way though being able to finish this project quickly would be nice. It is also recruiting season so there is that to think about as well.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week I will meet up with my partner and hopefully make some more headway on Project 2 and hopefully I will finish my other lab as well. Next week is also Career Fair so I need to prepare for that as well.
4. What was your experience of exceptions, voting, and strcmp?
Exceptions and strcmp were not new to me though the Voting Project was very interesting as I was not even aware of such a voting system. I liked the approach of first considering all the different possible ways exceptions could be implemented and talking through the shortcomings of each approach and ultimately showing how exceptions are an elegant solution. Reviewing the equality material was also a good review.
5. What made you happy this week?
Me and a few others managed to rewrite one of our pintOS projects from OS even though its been some time since we took the class. It was pretty fun and it was nice that we were able to remember what we had learned from that class and be able to complete the project in a substantially smaller amount of time than it took us the first time.
6. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Building cross-platform GUIs is very difficult 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 separate 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.
