CS371g Summer 2021: Mark Grubbs

• Where did you grow up?

I grew up in the town of Marble Falls, TX.

• What high school did you attend?

I attended Marble Falls High School.

• What was your favorite extracurricular activity in high school?

I enjoyed attending and competing in UIL meetings.

• Why did you come to UT?

My mom forced me to.

• Why are you majoring in CS?

I would like to be able to create games, focusing mainly on the programming part of the construction of games. I believe that games are the pinnacle of entertainment in this era.

• Why are you in this class?

This class is a prerequisite for CS 354R, the Game Technology course. However, after learning that the course teaches C++, I am now also interested in finally learning C++ after spending the past two semesters writing code in C.

• What are your expectations of this class?

I expect to gain knowledge on using C++ and learning about this concept of generic programming, which is completely foreign to me.

• How much C++ do you already know? How much Javascript/Python/SQL/Web programming do you already know?

The only programming languages I have experience in are Java, C, and recently Python. I started learning Java in my high school years in AP Computer Science A and a class like Computer Science B as well as taking CS 312 and CS 314, C in the classes of CS 429 and CS 439, and Python in CS 343. My knowledge of Python is the weakest among the languages I know, but it seems to be a simpler language than the other two.

• How did you like the first lecture? How did you feel about the cold calling?

I enjoyed the first lecture, but wonder how I will act in the face of being cold called. I cannot really say how I feel about cold calling until I experience it myself.

• What made you happy this week?

I had that I haven’t been happy this week, but then I realized that I enjoyed watching a movie called Mirai no Mirai, which is an anime movie that featured my favorite Japanese singer as the singer of the opening and ending of the movie.

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

When switching to Linux, it is highly likely that a game that you were playing before is no longer compatible with your distribution. One such game is Skyrim Special Edition. However, with Steam’s Proton software, many such games have been made playable including the game I just specified. However, what is more difficult to do is mod Skyrim Special Edition. Or at least it was until I discovered that there was a special version of the software commonly used for playing a modded version of Skyrim. It has yet to be released on the official, but in the github repository, the newest version fixes the issues with this software. The software I am referring to is SKSE.