CS371p: Week 6

What did you do this past week?
I finished up the Voting project with my partner, which involved fixing one specific edge case, writing a few more tests, and some logistics like creating the documentation. The hardest part of the project was definitely setting up the I/O, but now that we better understand it I’m hoping the next projects will be much smoother.

What’s in your way?
There isn’t much in the way this next week. Now that the project is over, I feel a lot more relaxed so I’m hoping this week will be much less stressful than the last, which had 3 projects due.

What will you do next week?
Next week, I will continue attending lectures and catch on a few of my other classes, since spending so much time on the recent project has set me a little behind in them.

If you read it, what did you think of the Open-Closed Principle?
I enjoyed the paper, and all the examples used in it. It helped me gain a much better understanding of how to structure programs to limit the places a wanted feature will affect, and gave me some ideas about alternative ways to format code to make it more flexible with future changes.

What was your experience of arrays, iterators, and algorithms?
I enjoyed learning more about some of the more intricacies and differences between the stack arrays, heap arrays, and using arrays from the standard library. I have a much better handle of the data structure semantics of the language now. I thought C++ was smart in how it handles multiple flavors of iterators, which allow iterators to only support what is actually needed.

What made you happy this week?
I’m also in Professor Downing’s software engineering class, and I was really excited to see the website for our project finally go up. It took many hours to figure out how everything in AWS works and I ran into many issues that took lot’s of time to iron out, so I was relieved to finally see the website functional.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is to get better acquainted with all the data structures provided in the C++ standard library. For example, know that array is like a Java array, list is a LinkedList, and vector is an ArrayList. Knowing about them will also help give you more options for designing your code.