Blog Entry #2

This blog entry will cover updates on my progress in the past week in Object Oriented Programming with Professor Downing.

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I mostly worked on beginning the Collatz project to get a head start. This project isn’t the most difficult, especially having taken SWE and done the same work in Python, but attempting a similar solution from scratch with all the required documentation requires a decent amount of work.

What’s in your way?

As of now, I am just struggling to get used to the C++ syntax and code structure. My only exposure so far has been through projects in Operating Systems, which truly did not cover anywhere near all the elements around the language

What will you do next week?

Next week, I will work on completing the Collatz project with all optimizations as soon as possible in order to give myself more time to allocate to other classes.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #2: Makefile?

I enjoyed starting this assignment early and being the first one to get my comments into Perusall. A clean slate kept me from being distracted by the clutter of comments and questions, and allowed me to do some research into makefiles on my own and share my findings/

What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, and coverage? (this question will vary, week to week)

I have always been a huge advocate of testing, and prefer to write my tests before, during, and after development of the code in question, which makes this project a bit more difficult. In my opinion, it is tough to write a ton of unit tests to confirm the expected failures before you have done any actual development. Due to this, I would prefer to have more flexibility than the workflow gives as far as testing.

What made you happy this week?

I was glad to get an early start on the first programming assignment for OOP, which is based on the Collatz conjecture. Getting started early means I will be sure to have more time next week to dedicate to other projects or to just relax.

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

Since gaming falls under this umbrella, my pick-of-the-week this week is the up and coming game, Splitgate. It is a first person arena-based shooter that combines some of the best elements of other popular games, namely Halo and Portal. One of the most interesting parts of its development is that it was created by a CS student at Stanford while he was still attending school, and it exploded recently in popularity with just a 30 person development team. Give it a try!