CS371g Summer 2020: Barrett Schonefeld

What did you do this past week?

This past week I reviewed my Collatz solution and made sure I provided all the details and components included in the rubric.

What’s in your way?

I drove back to my high school town, so I’m going to need to find a good balance of time between seeing friends, continuing my internship, and working on this class.

What will you do next week?

Early week I will start the Netflix project. I will start by writing the program to read the input data, make a simple guess, output the guesses in the correct format, and calculate the RMSE. Once all of this is in place, I will just need optimize the guessing, and the rest of the program will work the same.

What was your experience of exceptions, consts, and Boost serialization?

For exceptions, I thought it was interesting that you need to raise a reference to the exception. To keep the original exception in scope, C++ makes a copy of the exception and passes that reference up the chain. I thought, if passing a reference to the exception is the only sensible thing to do, that C++ could have chosen to make a copy and pass a reference by default (without having to use ‘&’).

I thing const is a great tool to provide the programmer some additional security on how a variable will be used. It’s great to be able to explicitly specify that a piece of data will not be altered and have the compiler help ensure that happens.

I’m interested in the encoding format boost serialization uses. It’s not immediately evident to me why loading the text from a file is slower than loading a boost-serialized file, but part of the answer may be that, when loading text, we have to interpret the data types of the groups symbols. I’ll look into this more as I begin work on the project.

How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?

Things are going well. I mentioned I drove back to my high school town. This has been great because many of my high school friends have headed back home, so it’s been good to catch up with friends.

What made you happy this week?

See directly above.

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

This past week has been packed, so I haven’t been exploring new software tools and resources. I saw one of my classmate’s posts in a previous blog, and they suggest this visual Git tutorial. I will reiterate this suggestion. I started working through the tutorial, and although I had used many of the features covered in the tutorial, I improved my understanding of what is happening behind the scenes without having to look directly at Git source code.