Week of October 28 to November 3
What did you do this past week?
A lot. I spent some time with my partner getting started on Darwin, I registered for classes (which went pretty well), spent some time on a tough project at work, finished a composition project for my music class, and celebrated Halloween with my wife, some homemade pumpkin pie, and scary movies (not terribly scary, I’m an absolute pansy about scary movies). Finally, I met with one of the librarians at the PCL for some research help (which I’ve never done before) for an upcoming paper, and that was actually really helpful. I had a vague idea of what to write about, but the librarian helped me find some really good sources to solidify that idea.
What’s in your way?
The biggest blocker right now is that there are only 24 hours in a day. This is about the point in the semester where I start needing more like 26 or 27 to get everything done and keep my sanity. However, this Sunday, there will be 25 hours in the day, which is step in the right direction.
What will you do next week?
I’ll be finishing up Darwin, working on my second-to-last paper for my anthropology class, and studying for my wireless networks class. We have some post-test bonus questions to answer for extra credit and I’m hoping to take advantage of those to save my grade.
What was your experience of the vector implementation?
It still confuses me, to be honest. I more or less understand the basics, but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of whether we’re calling the default constructor and the assignment constructor versus the copy constructor, and how we write those in terms of each other — it goes over my head. Too much thinking. I miss the simpler days when we called the constructor and that was that.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
This one isn’t terribly earth-shattering, but I’ve been using more and more Java streams at work (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/stream/package-summary.html), and they’re pretty useful. They basically allow you to iterate across iterable collections and perform functions on the fly, without having to write entirely new methods for simple things. They help cut out some unnecessary code for common functions, and are in line with the overall shift towards cleaner, more lambda-focused code that I’m seeing in Java. However, I’m no expert and this is certainly a biased opinion because that’s what I see more of in the code I look at, which is an extraordinarily small slice of what’s hip.

