Blog Entry #4

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 was able to take a break from OOP after finishing the Collatz project this past weekend. Unfortunately, this was short-lived, and I had to pick up work immediately for my other classes. One of the graduate courses, Algorithms: Techniques & Theory, ate up over 40 hours of my week for our first assignment.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is in my way after the past week of work. I am awaiting the release of the next project, so that I may ideally complete it ahead of time and get some more balance in my assignment and exam schedule. I feel this will allow me to be less stressed and anxious throughout the semester if I can manage to evenly disperse my classwork.

What will you do next week?

This coming week I plan to complete all out-of-class lecture materials and readings to gain a full understanding of the state of each class, and ensure I know what to bring up or which courses will require extra hours.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #4: What Happens to Us?

I completed Paper #4 this week, and I appreciated the insight it gave into the experience of other people in our field. Being in HACS and having worked for teams that were extremely considerate and inclusive, I personally have never experienced anything to this level of discomfort or targeted discrimination, but I appreciate the paper giving insight into how I can make others more comfortable. I plan to bring this into my work environment to hopefully eliminate these experiences and make my peers feel comfortable, happy, and included in a welcoming environment.

What was your experience of Collatz, exceptions, and strcmp?

I had a tough time with just one aspect of Collatz, which led to a ton of wasted crucial time last Sunday. The issue of values overflowing for large integers never occurred to me, especially since the different int types were never covered. I spent multiple hours debugging until I realized the values that were being returned, at which point I made the realization that another int type was needed and solved the larger test cases. As far as exceptions and strcmp, these have been straightforward and feel like a recap of our 312 course with Java, so I have had no issues.

What made you happy this week?

I enjoyed finishing my insanely hard course assignments and being able to watch the Longhorns blow out Rice under the lights. It was a much-needed turn of the page from last weekend, although we still have issues on the offensive line that need to be fixed.

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

My pick-of-the-week is the capabilities of VSCode with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). With just a few extra extensions, one can open any project under WSL in VSCode with full git support and keep their two environments separate with VSCode’s environment-based settings. This was especially helpful in my Neural Networks class for using the VSCode .ipynb extension for notebook support, which allowed me to build models using my local GPU and relieving me of the stress of development in Google Colab or having to install python and pip tools within Anaconda. I was instead able to do so with Ubuntu and everything was a breeze.