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’s in your way?

Not much is in my way right now. The first project has been going well, but I am worried I will make some minor errors. Going through the workflow was daunting, but ended up being not as bad as I had thought.

What will you do next week?

First I plan to be completely finished with the Collatz project by Tuesday. Working close to deadlines creates a lot of stress, so I plan to avoid that as much as possible. Also, if I have free time I would really like to work on some of my personal projects. One of my projects is in python, so I plan to learn how to do unit/acceptance testing for that.

What’s my experience of the class?

Class has been going quite well. While slightly stressful, the lectures continue to be thoroughly engaging. Project 1 has been a completely different experience from my projects in other CS classes. It is clear that using development tools (documenting, testing, formatting) is a major emphasis. In contrast, my other CS classes have mostly focused on ensuring that the code works well enough to pass the grading scripts. It’s nice to finally understand how to use these technologies.

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

This article is my pick of the week. It’s an interesting article about why you should be more wary when copy-pasting commands into the terminal. In the article the author shows how you can hide malicious code within commands. Many terminals immediately execute pasted commands, so someone can unknowningly run malicious code. After reading this, I doubt i’m going to blindly paste commands from websites anymore.