CS371p Fall 2021: Week of Nov 8th- Nov 14th — William Crawford

1 — What did you do this past week?

This past week, I submitted the Game Tech AI team project on Tuesday. I also started on the Darwin project on Tuesday. I worked on Darwin with a new partner for about an hour a day. We just finished passing our hackerrank tests, and are working on unit tests. On Wednesday, my team wrote out our technical document for our final project. We will be trying to implement some procedural map generation similar to Enter the Gungeon.

2 — What’s in your way?

The OOP project, Darwin, is due on Monday. I just have to create unit tests and do some code cleanup, commenting, and add assertions.

My last parser assignment for compilers is due on Tuesday.
I have a symbolic programming project about expert systems due on Thursday.

I will need to get my sections for the Game Tech team project in an alpha stage by next Monday.

3 — What will you do next week?

On Monday, I will work on Darwin with my partner until completion. After that, I will probably do some work on the Game Tech project.
On Tuesday, I will probably spend a majority of the day on the Compiler’s assignment and whatever remains will go to Game Tech.
On Wednesday and Thursday will probably be split between Symbolic Programming and Game Tech.
Friday will hopefully be just working on Game Tech with everything else turned in.
If I’m on schedule, I should get this weekend off.

4 — If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #12: More Getters and Setters?

I decided not to read the paper this week.

5 — What was your experience of initializations, copy constructor, copy assignment, move constructor, and move assignment?

My exercise team did good on the copy constructor/assignment exercise, so I’m feeling quite good about it. I still need to become more comfortable working around r-values and l-values for the initializations. The usage of explicit makes sense to prevent unwanted internal type conversions. Move constructor and move assignment on the outside can seem like a simple trick to improve efficiency of code, but I personally see their existence as signs that some poor design choices were made with cpp.

6 — What made you happy this week?

I decided to play some Terraria this weekend to revisit one of my favorite games.

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

Here’s a tip to operate more efficiently when coding. Whenever you feel yourself start to slow down or get stuck, either take a 10 min break, or switch tasks to something easier or different. Sometimes, I’ll come up with the idea that fixes my problem while not programming. Coming back to a hard program after a break can help you look at the problem differently. Otherwise you might just be trying to brute force a solution with 100 print statements.

a handsome face