CS371p Fall 2018: Alex Flores Escarcega
Week of 27 Aug — 2 Sep

What did you do this past week?
This week I spent a hefty amount of time exercising a bunch of skills that I care to improve in. For the longest time, I had wanted to improve my accuracy when touch typing. Another exercise is getting my “vimgolf” down in as few keystrokes as possible. That is, to practice my vim commands needed for operation in a few keypresses needed.
What’s in your way?
At the moment, real life duties that keep me away from my computer. Real life errands take up a whole day and can dramatically reduce productivity. For example, this past Friday I had to run an errand for my parents in NM which required me to drive out 12 hours driving there.
What will you do next week?
For the next week, I plan to accomplish all of my coursework as soon as possible. If time permits, I plan to revisit an old project that I had started about a year ago this time of year. I had been aggregating information about the likes, reacts, and amount of comments to posts made to the UT meme Facebook page. I want to quickly make a visualization tool for my friends who constantly post to the page.
What are your expectations for the class?
In this class, I expect to learn how to better learn new tools on my own. I am also excited to get a really good exposure to C++. Since the first day of class, I’ve learned the details behind a simple Hello World that I took for granted. Operator overloading, the type ostream, and flushing. I’m impressed with the class so far.
What’s my pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
This week’s tip is not as high as my previous weeks. None-the-less, this week I had discovered this new vim plugin that allows you to configure your vim’s status-line/tab-line. It’s called lightline.vim (https://github.com/itchyny/lightline.vim). You can make yours look very neat! This matters for the vim setup that you want to tweak just right and perfect for me because I had not yet figured out how exactly other people had customized their status-line.
I’m a fan of Vim and try my best to become more proficient in it every day. I can easily pick up another editor and type away there. However, taking the time to learn vim I think demonstrates some commitment. No one vim user knows everything that vim has to offer.