CS371p Fall 2020 Week 5: Abu-Zayd Abdullah
- What did you do this past week?
This past week me and my partner wrapped up Project 2. We fixed up our voting rounds logic, generated and PR’ed our acceptance tests, wrote our documentation and submitted our code. I also attended Career Fair which was certainly different this year. I also worked on debugging a problem for one of my labs and ended up .
2. What’s in your way?
Not a great deal aside from waiting for the next project and starting to work on my next Network Security and Privacy lab.
3. What will you do next week?
I will attend class, double check our submission for Project 2 against all the public tests available by Wednesday, and work on my Network Security and Privacy lab. I also need to start spending more time on LeetCode to practice for interviews.
4. What was your experience of values, addresses, references and consts?
It was a good refresher as we went over the same material in Generic Programming over the summer. After learning about them the first time though and getting some experience in using them I definitely see their value in ensuring certain variants don’t break. The const rules around pointers is especially interesting since there are a couple of different variants.
5. What made you happy this week?
Getting the HackerRank tests to pass on our first try. We thought that we would need to look into complex optimizations, but surprisingly all the tests passed on our simple solution which was nice.
6. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is a talk called “Empathy Driven Development” by Isabella Silveira de Souza. Souza is a very qualified Software Developer who has worked for all of the Big Four in Silicon Valley as well as has spent a good amount of time working in academia. Her talk talks about developing tools that you would trust to use and keeping consequences of the software you write in mind all the time. Aside from this she also talks about how we need to be thoughtful with regards to the applications we write, just writing something that will work for countries with fast internet connections is not enough she talks about how her hometown in Brazil has quite slow internet and that writing applications that don’t take users like them in mind is essentially denying them access. All in all an excellent talk she had an excellent talk this year as well which I highly recommend checking out.
