CS371p Spring 2024: Alejandro Byrne — Blog 10

• What did you do this past week?

I continued to wake up at 5:30am as I had started doing last week. I also switched my training regimen, focusing on more endurance work, ab-focused movements, and cross-fit lifts like clean and jerks.

• What’s in your way?

I need to be more brutally honest with myself. I put off doing my FAFSA for a long time because I convinced myself I was tired and deserved a break, again and again. I also did this when it came to securing internship opportunities for the summer. In reality, if I looked at myself with a level-head, I would realize that I wasn’t actually that tired and I could have been doing these things. But because it was uncomfortable to accept that, I ignored it. I overcame that this week and completed my FAFSA, now I need to continue with this momentum and not hide behind stresses or insecurities.

• What will you do next week?

This next week I hope to continue my 5:30am wake-up schedule. I am trying to get to the point where I wake up naturally at around 5:30am, but I think it’ll still be another few weeks before I adjust fully. I will also start swimming. I have tried new things that I don’t like to do but will get me in better physical condition like long-distance running. However, I avoided swimming because I really hate doing it. So that’s why I’m going to start doing it. Just because I hate doing it doesn’t mean I can’t do it, so I’ll prove to the lazy version of myself that I’m in charge. By that same token, I am going to spend a good 2–3 hours reaching out to people in the aerospace industry to try to get involved this summer and next summer, maybe through an internship, or simply shadowing.

• What did you think of Paper #10. Why getter and setter methods are evil.

It gave me insight to how my coding style can sometimes be too routine based on what I learned in high school. I remember encapsulation and getters and setters as a fundamental aspect of OOP in high school. It became a habit of mine to add them to many of my classes, even if there was no real reason, as I just defaulted to assuming it aided in the protection of my code from misuse. However, the paper revealed to me that most times, getters and setters are signs of classes that are not clearly defining implementation details from user-accessed elements. If something should be given to the user, it should be totally available, and if not, it should hide with the rest of the implementation details. I like this way of thinking and will try to think of my classes in this frame of reference before deciding to add accessor methods.

• What did you think of of std::vector’s copy semantics, r-value references, std::move, and std::vector’s move semantics? (This question will vary, week to week.)

I like the copy semantics and r-value references because it allows for more specifitiy in method definitions. I like when things are more clear. This way you can go to a method’s implementation and understand exactly what it wants, and then look at the code and figure out why it wants/requires what it does. As for the move semantics, I think they will be a bit hard to remember, but I appreciate C++’s efforts to be more memory efficient, essentially stealing values rather than making copy’s.

• What made you happy this week?

I had to do some activities for a PhD student’s study. The tests were very boring and time consuming, and I considered quitting because I’m not even getting paid for it. But I let go of my ego, realized that I need to finish through with something that I said I would do, and try to see the positive in it. Part of the test was to sit in a dark room for 20 minutes and breathe into a bag so my gas particles could be analyzed. I had to do this 6 times. I used it as time to meditate and reflect on my week. It made me feel more gratitude and reduced my stress. The great thing at the end is that the PhD student shared her data with me and I was able to get a very precise measurement of my resting metabolic rate, which was 1.3158… kcal/min. I multiplied that by the minutes in a day and I now know that my resting calories burned is 1,894, and if I add what my apple watch tells me I burn, I can have a very accurate measurement of calories burned, so I can know exactly how many calories to consume to get to my goal of 300–500cal less than I burn every day so I can lose body fat while gaining muscle.

• What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

DESIGN. I did not spend any time designing my implementation of the last project, Allocator. It caused me a good few hours of debugging my inefficient logic for coalescing blocks. For the Darwin project, I will spend time designing and drawing out my ideas so that I can have a deep understanding for my implementation strategies before coding. This way, I will experience less mistakes in my code and have to do less debugging.