CS371p Week 2: Jessica Huang
What did you do this past week?
Regarding this class, this past week I made a GitLab account, cloned the Collatz repository, and reviewed some of the optimizations that we discussed in class. I also learned a lot in lecture, including a refresher on how to manage your workflow for a new project.
What’s in your way?
I installed some of the required packages for the Collatz assignment, such as checktestcode, but I am having issues installing others, such as doxygen. This might be because of incompatibility with MacOS, but hopefully I will be able to resolve it in office hours with either Professor Downing or the graders. I am also a little confused about GitLab pipelines, as well as how to use Docker.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will go to office hours to get my environment fully setup. Then, I will get started on coding the bulk of the Collatz project, starting with a small working solution. If I need any more help as I am working on the project, I will post my questions on Piazza.
What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, coverage, and continuous integration? (this question will vary, week to week)
Well, I haven’t really gotten started on the project yet, so I don’t have too much hands-on experience with utilizing these topics in projects for this class. However, in lecture, I found Professor Downing’s explanation of code coverage very interesting; he talked about how writing bad tests obscures bad code, and writing good tests is crucial to writing good code. He also explained that by writing more and more high-quality tests and passing them, we can gradually convince ourselves that we have written code that works.
I had some experience dealing with continuous integration over the summer, since my team used Jenkins for CI/CD purposes. However, one difficulty that we encountered was that many people on the team were not very familiar with the CI/CD tool, and it caused people to be frustrated whenever their builds failed. Maybe if more people were able to take classes like OOP during college and get practice with CI/CD, it would make their working experience smoother.
What made you happy this week?
I ate some good Chinese food, and I cooked a lot of mac-and-cheese. I also got to hang out with my friends and play some video games (The Last of Us).
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Perhaps this is what tip-of-the-week is inspired by, but some folks at Google have published a C++ tip-of-the-week here for five years: https://abseil.io/tips/
