What did you do this past week?
This past week I solved the 3n plus 1 problem with meta cache, utilized the Linux docker images that professor distributed, and experienced Gitlab’s Continuous Integration.
What’s in your way?
I still need to complete the rest of the requirements of the first Collatz project, including writing edge test cases and having a merge request to the public test cases, writing comments to programs to explain my thought process, and so on. I am also taking Software Engineering so I am doing the Collatz project for that class as well except the language for that is Python.
What will you do next week?
Keep learning the new stuff really. First, I will go ahead and read some more documentation about the c++ STL library just to prepare what’s coming next. Also, I want to get to know more about the microservice architecture and learn some best practices that make robust microservices.
What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, pointers, and references?
My experience with assertions and unit tests has been great. It helps me to identify where the bound is of my program and also what are the objectives of the entire program. This is extremely important in the industry especially when the company is utilizing the TDD(Test Driven Development) paradigm. I actually find it challenging to understand the pointers and references. For example, int a = 1; int* b = &a; int *& c = b; in this case, b is a pointer that points to address of a, and c is a reference to pointer b, so dereferencing c will return the value of a which is the content of the address that b is pointing to. That’s pretty interesting.
How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?
I am doing fine and will continue to be fine. I think the professor’s office hour is the most helpful thing for me in terms of support at this time.
What made you happy this week?
I am happy that I get to know more about Dr. Downing this week during his office hour. I love the fact that the professor is willing to put his energy into teaching and get to know his students, which I find very rare in many others.
What’s your pick-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is the Docker. I am able to use the system and software that are containerized in it without any dependency requirement. I think this is a very cool software with the idea that “build once and run everywhere”. I would recommend all software developers to give it a try.
