CS371g Summer 2021: Manuel Molina Week 3

What did you do this past week?

The past week was filled with completing assignments for my classes. One of my classes is behavioral ethics, while the class itself is pretty easy and straight forward some of the assignments can be time consuming. In addition, we had a test for the class but I found myself enjoying answering the question. For most test I never use the majority of the time that is allotted but for this one I only had 8 minutes left. This was due to the fact that I really had to think all my answers through. Moreover, I had the assignments for this class the project, the paper, and this blog. The annotating of the paper was no problem. However, I wish that the blog question wouldn't get posted the day before the blog is due. Although, I still have enough free time to do things that I enjoy such as playing Skyrim allowing me to decompress.

What’s in your way?

I feel that I am in the way of myself. For example, I think to myself that my lack of knowledge holds me back sometimes when it comes to programming. However, I never really seem to dedicate time in order to fix this. Moreover, I tend to allow myself to slack of a lot while completing assignment. What I mean by that is that I’ll work for 30 minutes but then take a 2 hour break. I believe that with this and my poor time management I sabotaged myself and end up doing everything last minute.

What will you do next week?

This coming week is going to be mostly comprised of partner and I meeting and working on the Netflix assignment. We meet once already and we made decent progress so I am hopeful about future meetings. Moreover, for my behavioral ethics class we have one group presentations and a couple individual assignments that are coming up.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #3: Pair Programming?

I enjoyed reading the paper, I was very skeptical of the idea of pair programming. However, after the first meeting I knew that I enjoyed it very much. As I read through the paper they mention things that I’d experienced with my partner. In addition, the paper explained things that I will definitely attempt to implement with my partner.

What was your experience of value vs. pointer vs. reference, and Incr?

When it comes to value vs. pointer vs. reference it felt mostly like a review to me. I feel that most of use learned this in CS429 when we learned C. However, at this point it felt like a distant memory since it’d been over a year so it was nice to get a refresher. Moreover, having to implement incr was a great way to reinforce the idea of value, pointer, and reference.

What was your experience of Boost Serialization and RMSE?

I found boost serialization very interesting. When Professor Downing first explained what it does my first though was Huffman coding form CS314 I believe. They both are a way to compress data in order take less space. In addition, RMSE came across to me as a very standard way to calculate error for data.

What made you happy this week?

The past week I got ahead of my assignments so I was finally able to sleep earlier and finally wake up feeling rested. This is due to the fact I usually do my assignments at the end of the day.

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

Something that I started using awhile ago is an application called MobaXterm. The application allows you to ssh and access the file from the machine. MobaXterm allows you to edit files with its own file editor. Moreover, you can drag and drop files between yourown computer and the machine you are sshed to. I find myself preferring it to VSCode. However, one of the downsides is the lack of something like liveshare in VSCode.