CS373 Spring 2022: Nathan Gates Week 4
- What did you do this past week?
This past week, I did not need to do any work on Assignment 1, Collatz, for this course. I did, however, finish my second assignment in CS378 Cloud Computing, which was implementing the Map Reduce process on two separate, communicating machines, in the cloud. I also largely implemented the third assignment, which involves the same Map Reduce process, but is spread across 5 machines in parallel. Two machines are devoted to the Map operation, and communicate with both Reduction machines. The final machine collects the results of the reduction and performs a final reduction to produce the final product. I also spent a bunch of time preparing for my exam in my final math major course of my time at UT.
2. What’s in your way?
Currently, what is in my way are exams in three of my classes in the upcoming seven days. Having to prepare for examinations is taking a lot of time away from my regular assignments for all of my classes, as well as detracting time from my mental recharge and rest periods.
3. What will you do next week?
This next week I will be finishing the third assignment for CS378, as well as preparing for my three exams. Exam prep will take the majority of my time.
4. What did you think of Paper #4: Pair Programming?
I really like this paper. I find that I myself greatly benefit from pair programming as a practice, as it really helps me process the problem from multiple angles. It also helps me debug my own code, and is a much more effective way to code.
5. What was your experience of exceptions and types? (this question will vary, week to week)
As I have said in the last three blogs, I have experience with both exceptions and types from CS371p: Object Oriented Programming. I felt like I understood these concepts. However, it was very good for me to see how these varied from c++ to python, as it is indeed drastically different.
6. What made you happy this week?
This past week, Texas Ballroom concluded its final major week of recruitment, and we got a lot of new members who officially joined the club! It is always really exciting for me to see others become interested in the things I am passionate about, and to join that process.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is Visual Studio Code! If you are not already using Visual Studio Code, it is a wonderful IDE, especially if you, like me, do most of your projects via SSH into the CS Machines in the GDC. I have a windows computer and hate doing projects locally — but through SSH, I can use the much more comfortable linux environment.
Visual Studio Code is great because it is an IDE which allows you to SSH in the IDE itself, features its own terminal, and a file directory system. It allows you to localize the resources you need to use while SSH’d into the same development environment, and is honestly just extremely convenient. I also appreciate the way it colors the code to make it more readable and identifiable!
I just managed to convert one of my friends who is doing the Elements of Computing Certificate, and he says that it has made his coding so much easier than what he was doing for the last two years. I highly recommend giving it a try!
