CS371p Fall 2021: Week of Aug 30th- Sep 5th — William Crawford
1 — What did you do this past week?
I spent most of the week daydreaming a little in class and neglecting my work for my Minecraft server. I spent the whole week managing configurations for java jars and a bunch of server administration stuff. I’ve also been working on making a rudimentary website for the server using the skills that I learned in SWE.
2 — What’s in your way?
I have all of collatz to do. I’m not really worried though because I wrote a similar program in python last semester. I also have projects for 2 classes due in the next week in a half that I also have not started. Three of my classes this semester seem to be doing C/C++ related stuff and my fourth is in Clojure.
3 — What will you do next week?
I will probably get to work on my projects (definitely), but not after taking a break on Monday. I feel a little burnt out trying to stabilize the player base on my minecraft server.
4 — If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #2: Makefile?
Makefiles are makefiles. We’ve been using them in some way since we took data structures. I think I would be comfortable copying the config from a template to make one, but not writing one from scratch.
Makefiles for the C++ language doesn’t seem much different than what we were doing in SWE. I generally like that makefiles help automate some of the mundane non-programming tasks / backend necessities.
5 — What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, and coverage?
All of them are useful for program development, but I feel aren’t always a necessity for non-critical code like when you are testing frontend designs for a website.
In some way, doing all of these will reduce all the time spent debugging and increase the likelihood of correctness. Still need to be careful around assertions since they break the program upon failure. Unit tests and coverage together are great for CI, which I don’t remember talking too much about, but will probably be a reminder in class.
6 — What made you happy this week?
My minecraft server is still poppin. I currently have 13 people online playing on something that I spent a while setting up, and I feel quite proud. I’m probably going to get the basic website for it up this evening right before I go to bed. Would be totally cool if you could plug spurcia.com in the comments. I do have a live map hosted at spurcia.com:8123 if you feel like looking at it.
7 — What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I’m not really sure what to put here. This week I had to deal with some bugs with using programs that weren’t mine. If you do experience issues with open source software, be sure to post the issue on their github after finding out how to reproduce it. Bugs are just like questions in class. If you are experiencing confusion/issues, it is almost guaranteed that others are too. Not posting a bug report yields no benefit and you may have to wait longer to have the issue fixed. This also applies if you get into any closed betas for video games. Please utilize their reporting tools instead of just playing/complaining about the unfinished state so that the game can “hopefully” be released in a better state.
TLDR: Don’t be a freeloader
a handsome face