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’s in your way?

Since my partner and I are about done with the Life project, the main thing in my way right now are the quizzes. Unfortunately, I did poorly on last week’s quizzes, so I hope I can do better this week. Also, the end of the year is approaching quickly and I need to get to start preparing for exams. I have three finals on May 4th which is worrying, so I’m not sure how I will be able to effectively manage my time. I will likely have to start preparing sometime this week.

What will you do next week?

On Monday I plan to get all of the OOP project finished up. I still need to do a few small things like Doxygen and the git log. Besides this, I intend to study a good amount before each quiz. Outside of OOP, I’ve got a final paper to write in my writing flag course, which I would like to finish early.

What’s my experience of the class?

The projects have been a great experience. The guidelines are clear on what is expected, and any issues are addressed quickly. I appreciate Eric posting some example acceptance tests to help us test our code. At the beginning of projects, there aren’t any tests on the public test repo so debugging and optimizing can be difficult. These tests helped a bunch. Also, I like using Hackerrank to test the correctness and efficiency of our code. It removes alot of the anxiety associated with turning in projects because you know if your code is correct when you turn it in.

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

My pick of the week is to learn regex. Even though I’ve constantly seen it, I didn’t make an effort to learn it until last week. Learning it is super helpful whenever your doing any sort of pattern matching, such as searching and replacing in a text editor. I found the website https://regexone.com/ to be a great tutorial. It starts at the complete basics and gradually gets more complex. Also, the site http://regexr.com/ is a really good site for creating and testing regex expressions.