CS373 Week of 1 Feb — 7 Feb

What did you do this past week?

Last week I started working on Collatz and learned about some optimizations for cutting down on the runtime to be able to pass all three test cases on HackerRank.

What’s in your way?

Recently, I have been unmotivated and I’ve been putting a lot of things to the side. I know that if I continue, I will end up having a lot to do, and become even more unmotivated. With that said, I am confident I will get back on track and regain my mindset that I had last semester.

What will you do next week?

Next week I have a few other projects to finish for other classes. I plan on finishing those. I also plan on working on my own side project once I complete my coursework for the week. Finally, I hope to begin doing research for our next project in this class.

If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration?

I thought Continuous Integration was a genius idea. Prior to taking this class, I was not aware of continuous integration. I now believe the cool is vital to completing a large scale project as it minimizes the possibility of errors from occurring in a large code base.

What was your experience of Collatz? (this question will vary, week to week)

I had never heard of the Collatz conjecture, but after learning about it, I am really amazed how simple the conjecture is and yet it is still not explainable how every number creates a sequence that converges to 1. The Collatz project has been slightly more difficult than I initially thought, but after implementing a few optimizations, I have been able to make good progress.

What was your experience of exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)

I really enjoyed Professor Downing’s explanation to the different forms of inter-method communication to signal that something went wrong. Exceptions are really useful for handling cases where things go wrong. However, there are a few subtleties that can be overlooked when handling exceptions that are in a parent-child relationship. The best way to avoid mistakes when handling exceptions is to always put the except clause for the child before its parent. I will be sure to use exceptions when dealing with user error from now on.

What made you happy this week?

I was able to catch up with some friends and play some games online.

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

There is a cool website (https://cs1000.vercel.app/) which lists out resources for CS courses in good detail.