CS371p Fall 2021 blog 12: Zein Fakhreddine
What did you do this past week?
This past week I finished up project 4 Darwin. I had a very stupid and annoying bug that was causing me major headaches. The fix was extremally trivial and the problem itself was due to a small oversight by me. Nevertheless after I fixed that bug the rest of the project was fairly straightforward and I feel happy with what I accomplished. Other than that I continued to join lecture, complete quizzes, and work on exercises.
What’s in your way?
Just general assignments being due. I have been fairly lazy these past couple weeks and that culminated in a lot of work being due that I haven’t really payed much attention to.
What will you do next week?
Because we only have the half week a lot of my assignments are due at the beginning of the week. I will be rushing tomorrow and on Tuesday to get those finished. Other than that I will continue to join lecture and complete the quizzes.
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #13: Why Extends Is Evil?
I thought the author did a good job at explaining his viewpoint. They gave concrete examples on how extends can cause rigid code that is vulnerable to numerous errors. They also gave compelling alternatives to using extends such as interfaces or just having a class be a member variable rather than a parent.
What was your experience of vector and allocator?
I have been really enjoying these vector assignments as they give me a real understanding of how these built in data structures work under the hood. Unfortunately my group and I were not able to complete the final exercise. Some of the last bits about implementing the ability to have user supplied allocators and the possibly of them already being constructed confused me a bit.
What made you happy this week?
Getting closer to Thanksgiving break.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week is, if you are using VS-code, to debug the projects using the C++ extension rather than through the command line. This really helped me when debugging my project 4 as I was able to use breakpoints and got a detailed look at how the code was running.