My experience

My experience in OOP was excellent. It’s a worthwhile experience and leaving it I feel that I have good grasp of OOP and C++. Professor Downing’s style is lot different than any other CS professors I’ve had. The teaching style and structure of the course are unique and clearly well thought out. C++ can be intimidating, but Downing explains each concept extremely clearly. Also on some particularly challenging concepts he has humorous analogies to help you understand things better.

What did you do this past week?

Last week in OOP we learned more about handler classes and began talking about unique_ptr and share_ptr classes. I have used these classes in the past so it’s great to actually understand what’s going on behind the scenes when you use them. We had our last quiz on Wednesday, so all I’ve got left is the final exam. For the quizzes, I had some periods of poor performance throughout the semester, but overall I’m content with my grade.

What did you do this past week?

My partner and I finished up the Life project for OOP. We were mostly done last Sunday, so this was a stress-free and quick process. Another thing I did was attend Earth Hack over the weekend. This was a 36 (!) hour event with a focus on creating a project related to the environment. My group and I ended up doing moderately well by placing top 7 out of 80 or so groups. This event was a ton of fun and I actually preferred the 36-hour structure because it provided the opportunity to create a more fleshed out product. Also, one thing that continues to surprise me is how little sleep people can operate on with time constraints. I got a miserable total of ~6 hours of sleep during the event and a few of my group members were about the same, but we remained productive. At the time I’m writing this, I’ve just gotten back in Austin and I cannot wait to get some real sleep.

What did you do this past week?

Last week I got started on the last OOP project. This project is a simple cell automata simulation and is much like the Darwin project. The main difference between the Life project and Darwin is that in Life we have to use some new concepts like abstract classes and inheritance. We talked about inheritance last Wednesday and Friday, so it was easy to apply this in the project. And because my partner and I spent the first work session going through the design, the implementation process was quick.

What did you do this past week?

Last week I mostly spent my time finishing up the Darwin project for OOP. I’m glad my partner and I spent a lot of time planning the design as it made implementation extremely easy. As a result, things went smoothly and I had a decent amount of time to review my project before the deadline. Although, one thing I had difficulty with was the UML, so there’s a chance I will lose points for that portion.

What did you do this past week?

Last week we were introduced to the next oop project called Darwin. This project places a much greater emphasis on Object Oriented Design, which has made it much more fun and challenging. Another thing I did last week was attend a tech talk with Atlassian. During the talk they went into specific details on a performance issue with their product Hipchat. They described the process of how they discovered the source of their problem and the steps they took to solve it. The great detail they went into made the talk really interesting.

What did you do this past week?

I finished up the allocator project. Things went smoothly so there wasn’t any pressure to get things done before the deadline. Outside of OOP I took a test for language credit in Chinese. I was nervous about this since I have been learning independently for almost a year and I had yet to be tested in my ability. Fortunately, things ended up going well and I got enough credit to fulfill my degree requirement.

What did you do this past week?

In OOP, we were introduced to the next project – the Allocator project. This project seems more challenging than Voting and Collatz, so I’m really looking forward to working on it. Outside of OOP, I had a midterm in intro to computer security, which went well.

What did you do this past week?

During the week I spent most of my time preparing for the OOP test. Fortunately the test went well so I’m less pressured to do well on every quiz (not that I will stop trying). This weekend I went to Hack UT-Dallas. I worked with Jake Heald, Alfred Zhong, and Eric Lee. We created an app that connects phones with a user’s pc through bluetooth. With the phone, we send data over bluetooth that is translated to keyboard controls for video games. It collects data through button presses, touchscreen movement, and sensors. Most of my work was on the mobile side where I worked on the bluetooth, UI, and other challenges. Although android was very much my comfort zone, I’d never messed with sensors or bluetooth before the event so it was an excellent learning experience.

What did you do this past week?

Last week we learned about classes in OOP, so I feel like we’ve hit the big checkpoint in the class. And learning all the nuances of C++ constructors was a bit challenging, but I can see how they afford a lot of control.

What did you do this past week?

Last week I spent a bunch of time finishing up the Voting project. Having the Hackerrank contest for the project made the experience easygoing. Passing the tests provides quick assurance that we’ll get full credit for code correctness. On Friday, we learned about consts in C++ which are surprisingly complex. On Tuesday I went to the career fair, which as usual is a draining event.

What did you do this past week?

Last week I got started the second OOP project about Australian Voting. My group member and I have made some decent progress. We got a basic solution implemented, but now we must optimize it. In class we delved deeper into pointers and started looking at iterators.

What did you do this past week?

This past week I finished and turned in project 1 for OOP. Last week I mentioned that I wanted to use some free time to work on personal projects. I ended having some time so I tried to apply the concepts from OOP to my project. The project is in python so it took a little extra work learning how to do unit testing. However, the Github for CS373 was extremely helpful. Now I see why Downing suggested that we make unit tests before we start programming. I had not designed any of the functions with testing in mind, which created difficulty. Other than this, setting up Travis-CI and all the other tools was easy after project 1.

What did you do this past week?

Last week I worked on the first project for OOP. Fortunately I managed to get most of the project done. Hackerrank was a great testing environment, and it was fun gradually improving my code. It was tempting to start with the most optimized solution, but I made sure to start at the dumbest. In the end this approach was likely better because it gave me more experience with the collatz problem. Last blog I mentioned that I would review the readings and class notes before each class session. This approach worked really well in preparing me for the quizzes.

What did you do this past week?