CS371P Spring 2021: Samantha Tuapen

Hi all! This is my fourth blog post for CS 371P: Object-Oriented Programming

What did you do this past week?

I submitted my Collatz project. I tried to be very meticulous with following the steps of the workflow and having all the required files listed on the rubric, but I guess we’ll see how well I followed instructions after everything’s graded.

What’s in your way?

After these past few lectures about exceptions and passing by value/reference/address, I realize that I’ve been thinking of references and pointers as synonymous terms, which is why I was quite confused when we first began talking about ways to pass arguments. I’ll have to dissociate those two terms in my mind and make sure I fully understand these important concepts.

What will you do next week?

I’ll continue to play around with lvalues and rvalues and make sure I understand the input and output types of the most common operators in C++.

What did you think of the Pair Programming?

This paper brought up many good points about pair programming in terms of productivity, efficiency, cleanliness (bug-free) of code, etc. Though I do think good pair programming experiences come from having a partner you trust and communicate with. Overall, I’ve enjoyed all my pair-programming projects because it allows me to learn from others and practice explaining my thoughts and ideas to others.

What was your experience of operators, pointers, and references?

I’ve worked with pointers and references in C with my Operating Systems projects, but I was never really comfortable with the differentiation between ‘&’ and ‘*’. I’ve also worked with operators a lot in all different languages, but I’ve never analyzed their inputs and outputs as r-values vs l-values like we did in lecture.

What made you happy this week?

I finished the majority of my assignments and projects Tuesday evening, the rest of my week was very chill and I was able to work on tasks for next week! I’ve never been this far ahead in my schedule before, so it’s been nice to have more time to myself lately.

In my iOS group, we came up with an idea for an app for our semester-long project! We really enjoy this concept and hope that our professor will approve of it because I’m already getting excited to work on it.

Lastly, with all the free time I had on Wednesday, I made chocolate-covered strawberries to get into the spirit of the holiday and they were delicious (of course)

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

Many people are familiar with highly effective communication platforms such as Slack and Discord, but I only just found out last semester that you can integrate your GitLab pipeline to Slack or Discord to get notifications when someone pushes new code! This is extremely helpful when working with a team on a repo to make sure everyone is notified of any changes and everyone’s on the same page with progress.

Thanks for reading my post for this week! If you’re in Texas this weekend, stay warm!