CS371p Fall 2020: Barrett Schonefeld
What did you do this past week?
This past week, my teammate and I finished the Allocator project. We developed a working Allocator implementation. We submitted the Allocator to HackerRank and passed all the tests. We developed unit tests and acceptance tests for the Allocator. We handled the logistical items for the project, including opening and closing issues, updating the README with important information, formatting the code, opening a merge request on the public test repository with our acceptance tests, generating the documentation with doxygen, and providing the git log and latest git SHA.
What’s in your way?
Nothing is in the way! We need to submit the link to the repository when the Canvas assignment opens.
What will you do next week?
Next week I will prepare for the exams by doing the in class exercises and reviewing C++ concepts we have covered in this course. I feel confident in my knowledge of the material, so I think the exam will go well.
If you read it, what did you think of The Open-Closed Principle?
The Open-Closed Principle seems like a great principle to adopt for managing long-term software projects. It opened my eyes to some potential problems that may arise as teams develop large software projects over time. I started to see that a good way to design code is to create modules responsible for one piece of logic, allow communication with the module through an API, and keep the API stable so depending modules work properly.
What was your experience of iterator concepts, std::array, and std::vector?
The iterator lectures are interesting because they illustrate how C++ iterators are used to make code flexible and generic. C++ operator overloading provides a great foundation for making flexible code that is missing from a language like Java. It was interesting to explore the deficiencies of the built-in C++ array and the benefits of using the array and vector classes from the standard library.
What made you happy this week?
I got a few books each on different topics (health, biology, evolution of language), and I’m excited to dive into each of these! I’ve had one of the books, Behave by Robert Sapolsky, on my list for awhile because I found some of his lectures online intriguing. I’m excited to get a more detailed account of his ideas.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is the documentary, Human Nature. It outlines the latest information in the developments in gene editing and CRISPR, and it discusses the associated ethical issues and public opinion on whether these technologies should be advanced and used. It got me interested in human biology, which is what inspired me to move Behave (mentioned above) to the top of the reading list, and it helped me understand some of the challenges and applications of gene editing.
