CS 371g — Blog Entry 3

• What did you do this past week?

This past week, I had a test in my other class, CS378 Behavioral Ethics in the Digital Era. The test was average. In terms of this class, I got a project partner for the Netflix project and just barely started working on the project itself by getting together the pieces of the project that we would need to get it to run.

• What’s in your way?

In the upcoming days, I will need to work with my partner on the project to complete it before the deadline of Thursday the 24th. We still have yet to write any actual code, but I am still not too worried. Outside of CS 371G, in the ethics class, we will be going over more things involving our groups, but the thing most in the way is that I do not have a full understanding on what assignments are to be done since there are so many pieces that have not yet been updated on the Canvas page.

• What will you do next week?

This upcoming week, I will meet with my partner each day at 6 PM to work on the Netflix project. I will also be checking out the Amazon Prime Day sales, but I likely will not purchase anything since money is tight right now for me. Other than that, I will do my usual routine of attending every class and doing the assignments associated with the week.

• If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #3: Pair Programming?

In CS 439, our professor made us do paired programming and showed us some snippets of this exact article about pair programming. Those snippets she took were the individual steps/rules that were in the essay; the points that had their own headings like flush and warm cookies and cold milk. I think that she made the students read these and take a quiz on them, but I overall did not fully take them to heart. Rereading them now, I am seeing that I agree completely with points of the article, especially the parts about how people’s minds together make each other stronger and more capable of implementing ideas, how treating the piece of code as a shared piece is important, and the parts about taking breaks. I mentioned in the paper itself that in my previous groups, we never really did the flush part of the steps/rules, which I think hindered the effectiveness of being in a group.

• What was your experience of value vs. pointer vs. reference, and Incr? (this question will vary, week to week)

I had heard and known about values and pointers in past classes, but taking the time this week to go over them made understanding them much better. However, the reference part was completely new knowledge to me since, from what I see, it was new to me because I have not seen this coding semantic in the languages I know of, those being Java (which may have it but is not explicitly shown), C (which does not have this at all), and Python (which I am a complete novice in, so it might have these). I thought of references kind of like a shorthand for pointers with some small differences in terms of what a coder can do with them, but also many benefits when coming to error checking.

The Incr exercise reminded me of a project from CS 429 where the coder had to implement operations without using the operation themselves. It also continues to increase my understanding of HackerRank since I am a novice in terms of the website. Stretching the concept of connecting two things together, I just realized that it reminded me of prefix, postfix, and infix traversal of a tree works recursively; each of them are the same code but just in a different order. The same almost applies to post increment and pre increment, but there are differences such as the return type to ensure that lvalues and rvalues are returned for their respective rulings/semantics.

• What was your experience of Boost Serialization and RMSE? (this question will vary, week to week)

I have not had any first hand experience with Boost Serialization yet, as in I have not yet utilized it on my own yet, but the pieces that made it work enhanced my understanding about fstream.

As for the term RMSE, I had heard about it many times, and have perhaps seen a formula for it, but I never understood how to do it. Now that I have seen it, it seems like a simple way to get a good estimate for error that punishes larger errors while rewarding smaller errors.

• What made you happy this week?

I have found a couple of channels on YouTube where people watch/feed birds, and seeing the interactions has been fascinating. In one such channel, someone has placed a camera in a birdhouse, and seeing how the birds act in a private location has been interesting.

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

Windows 11 is coming out? But someone already leaked it. Here’s a link from CNN (but again, like last week I heard this news from the same YouTuber): https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/16/tech/windows-11-leak/index.html

It seems interesting that the OS seems to be the same for the most part with the only change that the UI looks more like Apple, with the toolbar being centered.