CS371p Fall 2021: Week of Nov 1st- Nov 7th — William Crawford

1 — What did you do this past week?

This week, I spent my evenings working on job searching and working on the Game Tech AI team project. In that project, we are working on implementing Pac-Man like AI with each ghost having a different unique behavior. I also started and spent about 2 hours this week on the OOP Darwin project with my new partner.

2 — What’s in your way?

I have the Game Tech AI project due on Monday.
I have a symbolic programming project.
I need to figure out the implementation for the OOP Darwin project.
I need to finish my pascal compiler parser due next Tuesday.

3 — What will you do next week?

I plan to do and finish the symbolic project tonight so that I can work with my game team on Monday. My partner for the OOP project and I will also be meeting on Monday. On Monday, the Game Tech class will also select teams and subject for the final project. I believe that I am staying with my current team with procedural generation as our topic. It is likely that my game team will use our last slip day and turn in that project on Tuesday. I guess I will use the rest of the week to work on that new project, OOP, and also start on finishing the pascal compiler parser that isn’t due until next week.

4 — If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #11: Getters and Setters?

This paper helped me significantly with what the graders meant by no getters/setters on the Darwin project. I’m starting to figure out how to do the interfacing between Creatures, Darwin, and Species for the data that each needs while avoiding exposing their whole private data.

5 — What was your experience of vector?

I feel that I let my breakout room down on Friday with the implementation of my_vector. We got caught up on implementing all the methods required before testing each and ended up not completing it because we forgot to set the end pointer.

6 — What made you happy this week?

I went out to see the Marvel Eternals movie this weekend, and that was enjoyable. I’m not really a hero nerd, so I didn’t know anything about the characters going in, but I have seen most of the MCU movies. I wish there was some more time to understand each character in the film.

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

When preparing for technical interviews other than joining the programing contest club or doing exercises on hackerrank, I have one tip for you.

Instead of stressing about finding the optimal solution immediately for problems that some interviewer might give you, write out some sort of easy solution first. Then you can think about optimizing it. Many technical interviews are more about watching how you solve problems anyways. I think that just writing out a memorized solution without thought explanation would be boring for an interviewer.

I have had a technical interview where I thought I failed by not thinking of the most optimized solution to the problem, and instead wrote down a brute force method. In that case, I was still able to advance in their hiring process.

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