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.

Also, today I attended Hack-MISA which was a 12 hour hackathon hosted by UT’s Management Information Systems Association. I along with Jake Heald (also in OOP) and three others developed a website to show whether a politician’s voting history was possibly influenced by donors. The project displays a voting record and compares the subject matter with the politician’s donors’ industry to see if there is a relation.

What’s in your way?

Not much is in my way since all my remaining midterms are near the end of the semester. In OOP, I do have the Darwin project to do, but things have going well so I’m not too concerned. The “no getters and setters” portion of the project represented a challenge, but my partner and I were able to account for this by spending our first few work sessions planning the design.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will be finishing the Darwin project. My groupmember and I have finished most of the design, which leaves unit tests, documentation, and other various requirements. Our code is still not passing all of the hackerranks so we will also need to get that sorted out as well.

What’s my experience of the class?

Class has been great. We’ve been discussing vectors in the past few class sessions. Initially, Downing introduced us to an naive implementation of the vector class and we have been going over ways to improve upon the dumb vector class. This has been great as we’ve been clearly shown the differences between poor and good design. Also the exercises where we attempt to implement components of the vector class have been particularly engaging.

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

My pick of the week is this blog about the programming language pipeline. The author describes the process of making your own programming language. The explanations are easy to understand and after reading it I’m pretty interested in trying to make my own basic language.