- What did you do this past week?
I spent most of this past week preparing for parts 1 and 2 of the exam. However, after the exam, I spent some time with my partner working on the Allocator project. We were able to get the allocate and deallocate methods partially working, however we were running into some issues writing ints to the char array. After solving this we passed 2/5 HackerRank tests, so we plan to spend today trying to debug this.
2. What’s in your way?
Currently, the biggest thing in our way are the remaining HackerRank tests. We suspect the issue is that we are not throwing the right exceptions and these tests likely test bad allocation. After we finish debugging this, our next steps are to write the unit/integration tests for the project and run astyle. After finishing these steps, we should be good to submit.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week, I plan to take a bit a break, with both the project and exam being over. However, I will still take notes and review the class materials, to ensure I don’t fall behind.
4. If you read it, what did you think of The Liskov Substitution Principle?
I thought The Liskov Substitution Principle was a very interesting and applicable idea for determining when to make something a subclass of an existing class. The idea that subclasses must behave in the same way in addition to just having a ISA relationship with their parent class helps ensure that the Open Closed Principle is maintained.
5. What was your experience of Test #1? (this question will vary, week to week)
I liked the 2-part nature of the test and felt I learned a lot from collaborating with my groupmates. However, I found the lack of autocompletion quite challenging, as it took time for me to remember all the C++ syntax. I also liked having the test split into two parts, as it made the time more manageable, rather than taking the entire test over a single three hour period.
6. What made you happy this week?
I enjoyed a nice Nepali meal from one of my favorite restaurants in the Bay Area. It has been a while since we have eaten there, so I was excited to try their food again.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week would be Maven. I learned about Maven as a Java package manager, while working on my research project, and can see how it can be very valuable. Maven has the ability for one to specify all the project dependencies in a pom.xml file, along with the ability to automatically build and test the project (similar to the makefile that Professor Downing gave).
