CS 373 Fall 2023: Angelo Culotta
What did you do this past week?
This weekend I went home for Labor Day. I’ve been able to see all my family, and I celebrated my grandma’s 70th birthday!
What’s in your way?
I have a ton of job searching ahead of me, and it’s almost like a kind of decision paralysis that’s making it hard to focus. I AM making progress, it’s just a lot of places all demanding my attention and resume. I think I’ll just have to take each company one by one :)
What will you do next week?
This week I’ll continue doing recruitment for Always Texas, and finish decorating my room (which is a bit lackluster at the moment). I should also be the strapping new owner of a couch this week! All good things to look forward to.
What did you think of Paper #2: Makefile
As I’ve seen the makefile last year in OOP, I was familiar with the structure. I nitpicked a bit more of my knowledge and made sure I was familiar with the build order, and I’m confident that I’m solid wrt this Makefile.
What was your experience of the Collatz project? (This question will vary, week to week.)
It’s going alright. I haven’t really made much progress, but since I took OOP I know what is expected, and should be able to easily knock it out Monday or Tuesday. I’m excited to do this in python, where memoization is a lot simpler to implement than C++.
What made you happy this week?
This week I got to play with my baby cousins and watch them happily play legos and sing Taylor Swift. Every time I come back home, it’s like they get so much older. Which, of course they are, but it’s been absolutely crazy to see my cousin go from barely babbling to talking within a month.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Portal 64 is an N64 remake of Valve’s Portal from 2007. Using modern compilers, physics optimizations, and decades of experience and community knowledge, the game is able to run at 30fps on hardware from around 10 years prior (when Moore’s law was especially showing itself). A neat optimization I learned was using the GJK algorithm to compute general intersections between 2 objects. The math is a bit much for this post, but GJK meant not having to write an any-to-any shape intersection function for a system with low amounts RAM and ROM. You can check out the project at https://www.youtube.com/@happycoder1989/videos , plus his git repo.