CS371p Spring 2023: Rachel Huang

• What did you do this past week?

This past week, I completed the first two checkpoints of my Networks project which included basic client and server implementation. I also had my class registration which thankfully went well, except that I’m currently signed up for 9:30 classes four days out of the week.

• What’s in your way?

I’m currently still looking for a partner for Project 5, so that has me a little bit stressed out. It’s looking like I might just go solo for this one. The only other thing in my way is I have a lot of overlapping exams and project deadlines later this week and next week, so I have to stay on top of everything as best as I can.

• What will you do next week?

Next week, I’ll get started on the Game of Life so that I have an early start. I foresee not being able to work much on school assignments later this week and on the weekend because I’ll be going to a powerlifting competition in Arlington. I also will work on finishing the final design, testing, and debugging of my Networks project.

• What did you think of Paper #12. Why extends is evil

“Paper #12: Why extends is evil” made a lot of sense in relation to decoupling the implementation of classes so that future changes can be made as painlessly as possible. By choosing interfaces over concrete classes, the programmer doesn’t have to think about or track down all derived classes when a change is made. I also think that Project 5 should be a good opportunity to see how interfaces can simplify a program.

• What was your experience of allocators and vectors?

I thought the syntax for calling allocator methods was very unintuitive, such as “allocate” being a static method of the allocator_traits class. In all, it felt somewhat repetitive of the allocator lectures we had back during the Allocator project. It was nice to finally flesh out a lot of the vector class through exercises to get an idea of what the C++ writers were thinking.

• What made you happy this week?

I helped my friend pick up her foster puppy this weekend from Austin Pets Alive which was my first experience really with fostering. The dog was named Bandana and was still a puppy so it was a cool experience getting him settled in for his new home for the next month.

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

My tip-of-the-week is related to Internet anonymity. As software engineers, one of the goals is to provide users with privacy and security. My tip is to download the Snowflake extension. Snowflake is a browser extension maintained by the Tor Project. It allows individuals(like you) to help users in censored countries access the Tor network. If you choose to enable the extension in your browser, other users will be able to use your Internet connection to access the Internet via the Tor network. Here’s the link to the extension if you use chrome