CS371p Fall 2020: Barrett Schonefeld

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I finished the Collatz project. I opened issues, implemented a solution with caching, and submitted my solution to HackerRank. I’ve taken two classes with Professor Downing before, so this project is quite familiar.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is in the way. If I want to make something up that’s in the way, the Canvas assignment doesn’t open until Monday, so I have to wait to submit the GitLab repository link.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will attend lectures and do the readings and blog posts. The material so far has been almost the same as the Generic Programming course I took over the summer. I imagine the courses will begin to diverge toward the end of next week. It will be interesting to see the contrast in material between the classes.

What was your experience of assertions, Google Test, and gcov?

I think it’s interesting that the C++ assertions work differently from C++ exceptions (this is the reason a failed assertion stops the suite of tests). The assertion technology is older and exceptions introduced new mechanisms and conventions. It seems to me that it would be better to use an updated version of assertions that work the same as exceptions

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

I’m doing well. I’ve been supplementing the highly cerebral experience of classes with manual labor and staying active. The physically demanding activities are a nice mental break from reading, lectures, and projects.

What made you happy this week?

It’s been good to start classes. I have an interesting mix of topics and professors this semester, so it was fun to start diving into the material. I’m especially excited for my class with Professor Mooney on Information Retrieval and Web Search. It’s opening my eyes to how challenging it is to build algorithms that classify and measure the similarities of text.

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

My pick of the week is this article on emerging technology https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/09/30/the-7-biggest-technology-trends-in-2020-everyone-must-get-ready-for-now/#1e1a555e2261. I didn’t have a pick of the week, but I did a search and thought this seemed interesting.