CS371p Fall 2020: Barrett Schonefeld

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I partnered up with an old friend who’s taking the class. We initially took some time to determine when we want to meet, and we put some times on our schedules. We set up the repository for the project by adapting the code from the Collatz project. We also wrote code to parse the input and build a data structure that describes the election in a way that will be easy to solve the given problem. We opened issues related to the workflow and work we anticipate doing and set ourselves up well to make good progress on the project.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is in the way for the voting project. I think we understand what needs to be done both in terms of the algorithm we will implement and the additional requirements regarding documentation, issues, tests, etc.

What will you do next week?

Next week, we will use the meetings we scheduled to continue to chip away at the project. The next step for us is to test that we’ve parsed the input and build the data structure as expected. Once we write tests that make us confident we have successfully built the data structure, we will implement the algorithm to determine the election winner. We will use the solution to generate acceptance tests, and we’ll add the acceptances tests to the public test repository. I imagine, with the time we allotted next week, we will be able to finish the assignment.

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

My experience in these lectures may have been a little unique because I have already had the same lectures on exceptions and strcmp. One thing I noticed on the lectures this week is that we spent a significant amount of time doing the quizzes in the beginning of the class. This may have been intentional because some of the quiz material is related to the voting project that was just released.

What made you happy this week?

I finished my assignment for info retrieval and web search. This is good because I have quite a few projects to finish next week. Finishing this assignment early will ease the pressure on the other classes. Also, I thought the assignment (and the whole class, really) was interesting, so it was a generally enjoyable process, and I’m glad I approached it proactively.

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

My pick-of-the-week is the documentary on Edward Snowden, Citizenfour. I did not know the details and significance of Edward Snowden’s choice to release information on the government’s data collection. I was intrigued by the podcast Snowden did with Joe Rogan. The podcast and Citizenfour were both interesting, and they helped me understand how broad and elaborate the data collection efforts/software is.