CS 371p Fall 2022: Michael Richards

• What did you do this past week?

I attended classes, did homework, worked on CS projects, the same as every week. It was a fairly uneventful week for me last week. I finished up the hard part of one of my assignments, which was a big relief. I still have some more work do do before it’s due, but after I did the hard part I took a break from it for a few days.

• What’s in your way?

I need a government course to graduate. I tried getting credit by taking the exemption exam that UT offers if you have AP credit from high school, but the exam slots filled up so fast that I wasn’t able to get a spot for myself. So I’m gonna have to take the course next semester. I met with my advisor to make sure I register for the correct course next when I register next week. I only have myself to blame for this though since I had 4 years to take the exam : ).

• What will you do next week?

I’m going to finish up the project that I’ve been procrastinating on. I’ve done the hard part but there’s still some work to do before I can turn it in on Tuesday. Registration is also next week, so hopefully all goes well with that. I want to take the virtualization course and the cryptography course. Next semester is my last semester at UT so hopefully I am able to get those 2 courses. I also have to take US government.

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

It was a good paper. I always hated getters and setters. They are a really easy way to ruin a good OO design. I found it funny that a lot of IDEs have tools that will implement trivial getter and setter methods for all of your instance fields with the click of a few buttons given that it’s such an easy way to introduce bad design into your code base.

• What was your experience of iteration and initializations? (this question will vary, week to week)

I enjoyed these introductions. The initialization intro was fairly confusing. The syntax is really tricky. I think the worst part about c++ is how hard the documentation is to read, so going over this in class with a lot of examples was really beneficial. The initializer list makes sense in the context of quickly initializing a data structure, but makes less sense when you try to map it to some other object. I wonder how initializer lists are used elsewhere.

• What made you happy this week?

My workload was very light this week, which made me happy. It gave me a lot of free time and was quite relaxing.

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

If you’re ever working on software that is supported on on multiple platforms, be weary of Windows’ filesystem timestamps. They’re not as precise as timestamps on macOS or Linux. see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/setting-and-getting-the-timestamp-of-a-file. It’s a pretty obscure tip, but just be mindful of it :). It took me a while to find out that this was the reason some tests were failing.