What I thought of the class
- What did you like the most about the class? Professor Downing has a unique ability to make obscure, confusing idiosyncrasies of programming easy to understand. He is a clear and effective communicator in lecture-, and the structure of the projects and tests drive home lecture material (for the most part) very successfully. I may have learned the most in OOP that I ever have in a single semester of any class, which is all the more impressive to me because I never felt that the workload was unbearable.
- What did you like the least…
Finding the meaning of (Project #5) Life
- What did you do this past week? I attended lecture and began the project as early as possible. I have decided to work alone on this last project, and I wanted to make sure I addressed any obstacles I might encounter as early as possible since I won’t have a partner to bounce my ideas off of.
- What’s in your way? So far there has not been anything too difficult about the project. I feel like I understand the approach to the problem thanks to having encountered a similar task in Darwin. I…
Darwin and double references
- What did you do this past week? This past week I finished Darwin with my partner, and I devoted more time to understanding the lecture material. When we started Darwin, we had a difficult time sorting out class dependencies while trying to minimize getters and setters, and for a while I was worried we weren’t going to finish the project in time. Once we finally got our design worked out and got our code to compile, however, we thankfully didn’t have to do that much debugging or any optimization.
- What’s in your way? Recently I have…
- What did you do this past week? This week I didn’t spend much time on OOP due to other assignments, tests, and commitments. I started the Darwin project, and I now wish I had spent more time working on it this week, as the problems it poses are different from those posed by past projects.
- What’s in your way? The hardest part of the Darwin project seems to be coming up with an effective object oriented design. …
First week of Zoom University
- What did you do this past week? I finished Allocator with my partner. Looking back on it, I really appreciate this project because this was the first so far where I felt like I was actually debugging my code rather than figuring out C++ quirkiness. In addition, I also studied for and took Test 1b. I was less fond of the test but more on that later.
- What’s in your way? I feel like I am slowly getting into a groove of being productive while working from home. The first two weeks, I got into…
“ExTeNdEd sPrInG bReAk”
- Are you and your family safe and sound where you are?
Yes, thankfully I am able to go home to a city where there is little viral activity in San Antonio. There is a stay in place order here so I have done little besides bum around my house but I am staying safe.
- How do feel about your ability to finish the term completely online?
I feel like I have the basic tools necessary to finish the semester online. I am worried, however, about my home WiFi, as it was already not the best and now…
Iterating over iterators
- What did you do this past week? We went over various properties of the range_iterator class, the friend keyword, and various C++ functions. I also traveled to Dallas for an on-site interview which was as fun and exciting as it was disruptive of my school routine and classes.
- What’s in your way? I feel like we have covered a deceptively vast amount of information thus far in the semester, so simply going over all of what we have learned will be time consuming. …
A week without Professor Downing :’(
- What did you do this past week? This week was a slower week as far as OOP has gone so far. I spent a few hours with my partner working on our project. We spent quite a bit of time trying to understand C++ syntax after we came up with our pseudocode, and after hours of trying to figure out why we were segfaulting, we decided to abandon using classes for candidates and ballots and use structs instead.
- What’s in your way? Currently, I feel like we need to focus more on getting our…
Commits commits and more commits
- What did you do this past week? I completed Collatz. I was worried about running too close to the deadline in my last blog post, and I ended up doing so but not for the reasons I expected. Completing an optimized algorithm and passing the tests was easier than I expected, but preparing the project for turn-in took much longer than anticipated.
- What’s in your way? This week (and also last week and the week before that) job applications and career fairs took and will take up a lot of my time. …
Getting my feet wet
What did you do this past week?
I started on the project, which involved getting Gitlab set up and forking a private repo, fixing the tests and implementing the naive solution, and pseudocoding some optimizations to pass the other tests. Before lecture this week, I reviewed the notes from the previous class day while I ate lunch so I was better prepared for the quizzes, which ended up serving me well.
What’s in your way?
The obstacles I have encountered so far are largely of my own making. The project seemed to me, at first blush…
Max Rattray
Student at The University of Texas at Austin studying Computer Science
