CS371p Fall 2018: Bohan Zhang

Final Entry

What did you like the least about the class?

One thing I didn’t like about this class is how tight the time constraints are for the exams. Even though there are only five or six questions while we are allocated an hour and a half, each of these questions can take upwards to twenty or twenty-five minutes to complete. With this established, we are essentially only given one shot and we can only hope there isn’t a bug in our code.

What did you like the most about the class?

What I really enjoyed about this class is how passionate Dr.Downing is in teaching this subject. During his lectures, one can truly feel his exuberance and the fact that he wants his students to succeed. The notes are always posted online and there is a detailed schedule to keep track of the progress of the course.

What’s the most significant thing you learned?

The most significant thing I learned it surprisingly not relevant to C++, but rather the importance of writing well-documented code. For some of the earlier projects, my codes were complete scrambled together for the pure purpose of passing the test cases. As a result, I often found myself later on having to spend a lot of time just to fix the code, and if there were a bug, I often needed to spend a significant amount of time first trying to figure out what my code actually means. Later on when I became attentive to style and documentation, however, my efficiency was drastically boosted.

How many hours a week did you spend coding/debugging/testing for this class?

Because I find this class to be a bit difficult, I tend to spend about 12–17 hours a week.

How many hours a week did you spend reading/studying for this class?

About 2–4 (Probably why I found this class to be difficult).

How many lines of code do you think you wrote?

Each project is about 300–700 lines depending on my choices of implementation and the nature of the project, and so, I would say about 3000 lines total.

What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?

Valgrind. At first, I hated it because of the uninitialized variable errors. Later on, however, I found it to be very helpful in debugging, especially in determining the source of the bugs.

If you could change one thing about the course, what would it be?

I think we should be allocated 3 hours for the exams, maybe with a few more questions added.