CS373 Fall 2018: Yujie (Jessie) Chen
Week 2: 09/09/18
What did you do this past week?
In class, we briefly went over Project #1, called Collatz. This project centers around a simple math problem, where if you take a positive int and divide by 2 if even or multiply by 3 and add 1 and keep doing that with the result, it will eventually reach 1. The purpose of the project is to find the cycle lengths of numbers and return the max cycle length found. We also went over asserts; we learned that asserts as a test of preconditions, postconditions, and loop invariance is good, while asserts in tests are considered bad. Other things we went over in class included static methods, self and this in programming languages, and how to really set up the workflow for project 1.
What’s in your way?
The lack of time. I have a busy semester with a part-time internship, orgs that I have commitments in, 15 hours with 3 cs classes, and RECRUITING. I really hope I will manage my time well but knowing me… that’s a hard thing to do (for me).
What will you do next week?
I’m hoping to go to my classes, pay attention in class, get ahead on homework and projects, and figure out the next steps to completing Collatz. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get used to the workflow and the project won’t take too long to complete.
What’s your experience of the class?
So far, the lectures have been intriguing and relevant to our projects. However, it seems like the projects have a ton of overhead, which is something I’m not a huge fan of. I understand why it is important since it mimics what actually happens in the industry, but I feel like it’s something that is too time-consuming for school. In the industry, a small project like Collatz can take two weeks (same amount of time we’re given), but unlike in school, you have fewer obligations, activities, classes, part-time work that you need to worry about.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is Medium.com. There are so many tech/cs writers on Medium! I always struggled on a couple CS concepts like recursion and dynamic programming, but reading a couple articles on Medium about those topics really helped me a lot.
