Blogs: Week of 28 Oct — 3 Nov

What did you do this past week?
I worked on understanding the next project, Darwin. I went to class and learned a lot. I also got my grade for the OOP test. In my info retrieval class, I learned a lot about the search engine’s advent and how different versions were released. In addition, it turns out that there is an open source dictionary out there called WordNet that catalogues words and their relations to one another, for purposes in natural language processing and the like. It has hundreds of thousands of collections of word relations. This can be used for search engines, chatbots, or any variety of software where language is necessary.
What’s in your way?
A big issue I have been encountering is understanding the documentation for Darwin. A lot of the time I will try and implement something but not understand how, even though sometimes it is as simple as executing a linux command, oftentimes I am not familiar enough with the tools to comprehend the basic method of completing the task at hand. Reading the documentation definitely helps steer me in the right direction towards this, but it can be difficult to understand why it is being used in the context of the program. Especially in the context of the complexity of Darwin, it is not always apparent what to do when implementing ++ and — , and what to do when you reach the end of the container.
What will you do next week?
Next week I will get with my partner and work on project 4. It shouldn’t be too difficult if we carefully read the project requirements and I have experience in project 1,2, and 3 doing the necessary steps.
What was your experience of the vector implementation? (this question will vary, week to week)
It is interesting, it really helps me understand the importance of the const keyword as well as how data structures interact and are implemented in an object oriented way. Vector is a really useful and efficient structure, much better than a list. I thought it was interesting that one of the methods just needed to be copied three times in order to implement other methods necessary for vector, it shows how redundant code can be at times. It was cool knowing that swap actually had use for one of the methods. I liked how vector is versatile and can be used for a lot of things, and can act constant as well if needed.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is to make sure that you have a good debugging tool or method to find bugs more easily than just cout statements. A big problem I have ran into is finding exactly where my bugs are and what causes them, and an additional tool to help with debugging is useful like GDB. You have to learn some extra stuff but it’s good.
