CS371p Spring 2022: Jonathan Randall

What did you do this past week?

I finished Collatz. I worked on some assignments in my Data Mining course. In preparation for the winter weather, I bought food and water bottles. Then, when the winter weather turned out to be not too bad, I felt like I had overprepared. Then, when the City of Austin declared its third “boil notice” in four years, I felt underprepared again!

What’s in your way?

I’m a little behind in my Big Data course. In this course, I’m looking for instructions for adding graders to the GitLab repo, which aren’t anywhere I’ve checked. Any ideas? Additionally, are there requirements for coverage? Is there an easy way to view coverage information for Collatz.cpp?

What will you do next week?

Next week, I will try to refine my understanding of types in C++. I will begin working several new projects for other courses as well.

What did you think of Paper #3: Continuos Integration?

I have read this article from Martin Fowler before. One thing to note: many ideas and practices seem outdated. Why a single repository, especially in the age of huge codebases and loosely-coupled microservices? Why a single mainline branch in the repository, when strategies like Git Flow so elegantly captures the need for teams to work on different, isolated features at once? Well, Subversion does use a centralized workflow.

Despite these antiquated practices, the argument takes a forward-looking approach that correctly predicted the explosion of Continuous Integration, test-driven development, and better version-control hygiene. It is harrowing to imagine a world in which locally-hosted source code (without version control) reigned supreme. I’m surprised we made it this far.

What was your experience of UnitTests, Coverage, and IsPrime? (this question will vary, week to week)

I love unit testing. Understanding Python’s unittest has helped me in interviews, and I credit it to helping me get my last job!

IsPrime was a great toy problem that led me to think about optimizations. I still don’t understand how to make coverage reports beautiful to view. I believe VS Code has some extension that when used with gcov will generate beautiful, line by line feedback.

What made you happy this week?

I went to San Antonio and went to a friend’s birthday party. It’s always interesting to reflect on how old San Antonio. In comparison, Austin is but an infant.

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

My tip-of-the-week for my VS Code users is this Doxygen Documentation generator. It automatically inserts Doxygen-compatible comment stubs and makes life just a little easier. It even automatically annotates files, variables, and functions, filling in the names of parameters and suggesting descriptions.

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