CS371p Spring 2019: Yijie Tang
Week of 28 Jan — 3 Feb
What did you do this past week?
This week, I followed along in all my classes, got caught up on most of the reading, and got started on some class assignments. The biggest hassle so far was that I needed an AWS account for Cloud Computing, but my AWS account was suspended as soon as I created it. Certain details on my account information could not be verified. This may have been because my IP address location did not match my billing address location. The account that my parents created using the home IP address did not get suspended. I ended up using that account instead.
What’s in your way?
I am still thinking about whether to make any changes to my schedule by Wednesday. I have had no issue with keeping up with the coursework in CS371p so far. My combined course load from all classes though, is becoming heavy. My performance in my classes will likely take a hit from having to manage all the work at once.
The other challenge is to stay focused and get more work done, particularly on weekdays. I feel that I have sometimes been unproductive, especially when feeling tired after class. Keeping up and getting things done before the due dates will require energy and motivation.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will continue to read and work on programming assignments for my classes. I will also get started on the Collatz project. Once the schedule for the semester is finally settled, managing classes should become simpler since I will have a better idea of how to allot and manage time.
What’s your experience of the in-class exercises?
The quizzes overall have not been too easy or too hard.
The first two exercises which I got all points on were easy and straightforward. The third exercise wasn’t conceptually difficult, but I did not understand what the questions were asking for by expressions such as “operator+()” (for example, what the parenthesis meant) when taking the quiz, so I lost some points. The question asked about l-values and r-values and described arguments as left-hand side and right-hand side, which confused me further as to whether it was referring consistently to type or position. Only after going over it in class did I comprehend that it was asking about the type of values returned and about the type of values at those locations. The fourth exercise was simple, minus the last question which asked how inheritance works alongside throwing and catching exceptions. We have gone over exception handling in class, but I don’t feel we covered objects all that much.
Some days the answers are straightforward and the quiz is easy, while on other days it catches gives a surprise. Nevertheless, I study and try to score as well as I can. Ultimately, the quizzes do make the class very engaging.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week are these Bash color and format codes that allow for printing colored and formatted text on the terminal. I have discovered that they can also be incorporated into strings in programming languages such as Java, which allows for the output to have various colors and attributes.