Blog #4 — CS 371g

What did you do this past week?

My partner and I completed the Netflix project. The caches that the other students created with boost serialization were helpful in simplifying the access of the information that was available to the students. The difficult portion of this project was getting the formatting down and finding a formula that decreased the RMSE. After this project, my understanding of C++ has become slightly more polished.

What’s in your way?

As for this class, I have nothing that I know of that will be due next, but I wonder what the next project will be about. In my other class, the class is only a First Session class, so the class is almost over already. In that class, the students were placed into groups and given a project. So therefore, what is ahead is completing that project.

What will you do next week?

Go to class as usual and work on the project for another class. I will also try to get another partner for the next project for CS371g.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #04: Twice as Good?

This paper somewhat parallels the other class I am currently taking during this summer. This other class is CS378 — Behavioral Ethics in the Digital Age. In that class, we have been focusing on understanding bias and thinking of how to mitigate/stop it from continuing in technology and computing. In terms of the points of the paper, one point that I agreed with was that the author pointed out that ethics courses in computing focus on security rather than the topics of the paper. Seeing as how the teachings of computer science can be easily abused without teaching others of how misuse is wrong, teaching students about security is important. This however, should not be an excuse to ignore the topics of this paper.

What was your experience of exceptions, consts, algorithms, and iterators? (this question will vary, week to week)

I have had few dealings with working with exceptions, but seeing them in action has emblazoned how they work into my mind. The intricacies are interesting too; putting catch blocks in the correct order in case one exception is the child of another seems annoying, but the ability to do so is very important in case some exceptions act similarly to others.

const was a keyword I had known from C, but in CS 429 and CS 439, I had not had any explanation about it other than that it makes a number unchangeable. Seeing the many other ways it can be used always made me think “how could this feature be utilized?” but the explanations that the professor gave answered this question fully.

As for algorithms and iterators, it was interesting to see how many of the algorithms were similar in structure, but, due to small changes in need for the containers, the types of iterators required were different.

What made you happy this week?

The Steam Summer Sale is happening right now. The deals on the sale are great as usual, in contrast to the terrible Amazon Prime day sales.

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

This week, I wondered if the word “spaghettify” was an actual term. It turned out that it was! It was defined as what happens when an object is squeezed into a long tube by powerful gravitational forces. Should it happen to a living organism, they would likely perish. The reason I am talking about this term is because it brought me to looking up the definition of “spaghetti code” again. Spaghetti code is a term used for code that is poorly managed and hard to understand from an outside programmer. So I guess that if someone were to spaghettify their code, then the code itself would suffer greatly.