CS371p Fall 2022: Rithik Batchu

What did you do this past week?

I went to class, and I finished up the test cases and cleaned up the code and added the necessary asserts and such for our project 3 allocator. For cloud computing, we implemented a few data streaming projects using pyspark and did some other assorted data wrangling. Finally, I also worked on Networks this week and finished implementing the TCP sliding window protocol.

What’s in your way?

I’ve just been a bit busy with grading papers for an exam in one of the classes I TA, finishing the never-ending amount of projects in cloud computing, and studying for various exams. I haven’t been able to explore fields/topics that I find interesting in an independent setting as much as I would like. Other than this though, not much in my way.

What will you do next week?

I will take a look at the specifications for the Project 4: Darwin assignment and I will start working on the initial solution and begin working on optimizing the code (if any are present) with my partner. I will also be studying for a few exams and working on projects for a few other classes in preparation for Thanksgiving break.

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

I think Paper 10 had some good points, but I think it’s actually quite hard to implement in practice. I think the point it was trying to get behind, that private state data probably shouldn’t be exposed outside an object is probably really true, but it’s also really hard to design a system beforehand to see what state absolutely needs to be exposed and what doesn’t. I did really like the point about minimizing data movement though.

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

I actually got a little frustrated with all the different behaviors that C++ allows for initializations. I think having fewer more opinionated ways of initialization is a lot better because it’s cleaner, and more consistent, and isn’t prey to a bunch of random corner cases.

What made you happy this week?

I was happy to that I slept for 13 hours on Friday, because I’ve been feeling quite sick for the past few weeks, and the sleep helped me recover a lot. I was also happy that I was able to finish all my assignments on time despite feeling really out of it.

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

My tip of the week is to use a java library called Lombok. It’s a super useful tool that allows the addition of annotations to automatically generate/compile a lot of useful boilerplate. It’s also really cool because there are quite a few options to make it pretty customizable.