CS373 Fall 2020: Brandon Nsidinanya
What did you do this past week?
This past week, amongst other work that I had to do for my other classes, I put in a good amount of work into the Collatz project. I pretty just much followed the workflow on the class website. I ran the given tests, confirmed success, fixed the tests, confirmed failure, implemented the simplest possible solution; the tests passed, but the Gitlab CI Pipeline failed because it couldn’t complete. Then I implemented some optimizations, and before I knew it, everything was passing and the pipeline actually finished. It was smooth sailing from there.
What’s in your way?
Right now, I just need to finish up some housekeeping and formatting tasks for the project, and then I’ll officially be done with the project. This includes, running Black for formatting on all of the files, running PyDoc, creating a file with the git log output, and some other minor tasks. Other than that, I’m pretty much done, and nothing else is in my way.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I’ll continue attending classes and doing my work as usual. I don’t think I have any tests coming up, so there’s nothing different that I’ll have to do next week. As for this class, I assume that the next project will be released and our teams will be assigned, so I guess that there’ll be some work related to that for next week.
What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions?
The project in itself wasn’t too difficult. The concept of Collatz is definitely intriguing. I’m not sure if there’s any real-life application for Collatz, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless. I liked the fact that the starter Collatz code was wrong and the starter test code was wrong, too, but it was right in the context of the starter code. It kind of drives home the fact that bad tests can hide bad code. Using the makefile has been pretty convenient, especially when needing to complete different parts of the workflow. It definitely makes me consider using a makefile in any future projects that I may work on. Exceptions are something that I think I understand pretty well, but the lecture on exceptions made my knowledge of the topic even better.
What made you happy this week?
Something that made me happy this week, even though it sounds kind of bad, was quitting a job that I had been working since the semester started. It was causing me a lot of stress, but quitting made me feel a lot better.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is Git Bash. It’s a Linux shell that can be used in Windows. It’s been super helpful for running Linux commands while still having a Windows machine.
