CS371p Fall 2021 blog 6: Zein Fakhreddine

What did you do this past week?

This past week I continued to work through project 2. I’m nearly done with it. I would have liked to finished it up before the start of the weekend, but last week was very busy for me with my other classes. I continued to attend my classes and work through projects in other classes.

What’s in your way?

The only thing I have due next week is project 2. Once that is finished this upcoming week should be fairly easy. I need to catch up on some of the material in my other CS classes. Last week got me more behind than I would have liked.

What will you do next week?

Finish up project 2. I also re-watch some lectures in my other CS classes to make sure I fully understand the material. As for this class I’ll continue to join lecture.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #6: Single Responsibility Principle?

I also read this paper last semester in SWE and my takeaways are relatively the same. The authors focus on the ability for a project to change direction and minimizing the potential side effects in doing so. SRP is a design tool to help construct your classes in a way were each one only has one responsibility. I’m still confused on how exactly you decide what the responsibilities of a class are because it seems, depending on how fine grain your viewpoint is, that it can vary quite a bit.

What was your experience of stack, queue, priority_queue, values, pointers, and references?

I really like how professor Downing explains the underlying implementation to the data structures we’re learning about. It makes it easier to understand why one data structure might be more valuable than another in any given situation. I feel pretty confident of my understanding of values and pointers, but references are new to me. I need to take professor Downing’s advice and play around with these concepts in an IDE to gain a better understanding.

What made you happy this week?

I had a lot of tests and projects due so getting to Friday and finishing them all was a big relief.

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

If you use VS code this is a sheet of most of the useful default key binds. I find that knowing just some of the most important ones can speed up development more than you might think.