CS 371P Fall 2023: Gautham Rajesh

What did you do this past week?

I started working on assignments across my classes, including the Collatz project for this class. This also meant that I started getting in the groove of things and getting used to my schedule.

What’s in your way?

There was a project in one of my CS classes that was due on Thursday, so I was spending a lot of time on that and I was a little stressed about it. This was in addition to a lot of long assignments I had for other classes, so the overall workload was a bit intense.

What will you do next week?

I will focus on finishing up this project. I made some progress in terms of understanding the Makefile and the workflow, as well as starting to write my solution, but not much else. I am also going to start applying for a lot more jobs and doing Leetcode problems, as it is the beginning of recruiting season. I should be able to get a lot more done since my workload is a little bit less next week.

What did you think of Paper #2: Makefile?

I was not expecting to annotate the Makefile, but it was useful. I always knew that Makefiles were a very powerful tool to automate building and compiling programs, but I never really understood how they worked under the hood. After reading through the file and annotating it, however, I was able to understand why a Makefile was needed, especially since there are a lot of libraries used.

What was your experience of the Collatz project? (This question will vary, week to week.)

My experience has been good so far. While I haven’t made a lot of progress, I started implementing a basic solution to see if I’ll pass some of the test cases. The annotation of the Makefile really helped me understand how the code I was writing was going to be checked for coverage and for correctness.

What made you happy this week?

I was able to find time to work out and hang out with friends, while having a good amount of work to do this week. I also got a free T-shirt from the Party on the Plaza event in front of Greg, which was nice!

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

My pick of the week is Rectangle, an app for macOS. It provides keyboard shortcuts for easily moving app windows to whichever part of the screen you want to. I find it very useful to quickly have the instructions for a project and my VS Code window side by side, so that I don’t have to keep switching windows in order to do one thing.