CS371p Fall 2021: Week of Sep 20th- Sep 26th — William Crawford

1 — What did you do this past week?

I got started on project 2. I met with my partner in the GDC lab. We setup the gitlab and finished the main method in an hour and a half.

I also completed my first project for the game tech class where we created our first plugin for the godot game engine. The goal was to implement our own little bit of physics but only for elastic collisions.

2 — What’s in your way?

I think my partner and I already discussed the implementation for project 2, so we don’t really have to worry about it too much (except for debugging).

My second project for game technology will be starting next week, and I will need to meet with that group as well.

I also have a project for symbolic programming due on Thursday. I’ll need to write a simple algebra solver but in Clojure.

3 — What will you do next week?

Next week, I will be finishing up a project for compilers on Monday. Then, I will have a meeting with the game technology group to start a project on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I’ll meet up again with my partner for OOP, and hopefully get our main implementation working. Throughout the week, I will also need to be working on the symb project after the group meetings.

I suppose if the week is good, I’ll have free-time on Friday (maybe do some job apps).

4 — If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #5: Pair Programming?

Pair programming is an escape from the hair pulling solo debugging and getting stuck alone. I enjoy the time that I spend programming with other people generally. The main thing that makes or breaks the partnership for me is communication. I’m not great at it myself, but not communicating when you have a problem means that the interpersonal relationship won’t be fixed.

5 — What was your experience of vector, list, and deque, and invalidation?

Pretty much on par with what I’d expect for features that are analogous to Java data structures. I had some fun this week being called on in class to go over the vector part which is similar to ArrayList. I don’t really have much experience with deque. Listening to it in class reminded me of one of the methods of handling large discontinuous files from the filesystems part of os.

6 — What made you happy this week?

I played some games with my friends notably Minecraft, Europa Universalis 4, and Age of Empires 3

On home game weekends, it seems like the frat by my apartment likes to host parties. I enjoy watching them down there for a little bit and maybe a little bit of their music.

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

My game technology prof. keeps reminding us that we can read the source for the game engine that we are modifying. I usually stick to language documentation and manuals, but for many large, open source projects, there is no documentation. I’m lucky that some stuff exists for godot’s custom language, but when things get tricky and unexplained behavior arises, reading the source may be better than hours of debugging.

a handsome face