CS371p Spring 2022: Jonathan Randall

What did you do this past week?

It’s been a whirlwind. In this class, I got started on Voting. My partner and I wrote code to parse the input, and later today we hope to tackle the problem using the simplest implementation we can think of.

Simultaneously, I have made headway on projects for my two other courses. On top of this, I am still in the process of interviewing for a full-time gig. My brain is Jello.

What’s in your way?

We have to write out our proposed implementation to solve Voting. In my Big Data class, we have to figure out how to repartition our dataset to avoid costly shuffle operations incurred during calls to join.

What will you do next week?

I am going to LA on Thursday to visit my friend. Perhaps we will hike or work on a mix-tape. Before that, I must finish some big assignments!

What did you think of Paper #5: Single Responsibility Principle?

After reading “Single Responsibility Principle,” I am reminded of the importance of abstracting and separating out un-related functions into loosely-coupled classes. While I have used and appreciated many well-designed classes through various libraries, I hope that in the duration of this course I get the opportunity to try out some of these OOP concepts.

What was your experience of l-values, r-values, pointers, and references? (this question will vary, week to week)

Here is my attempt to recap my knowledge:

  • l-values are values that you can assign a value to. In other words, you can have an l-value on the LHS of an assignment!
  • r-values are values that you cannot put on the LHS of an assignment without a compile error. r-values don’t have a memory address, so how could you possibly assign them to be anything?
  • pointers are variables that stores the memory address of an object.
  • references are simply aliases to another variable, and can be created as follows:
int i = 2;
int& r = i;

What made you happy this week?

I went to San Marcos, where I saw a random metal(?) band perform immediately before a poetry reading.

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

My tip-of-the week is a strategy I have been using this semester. I call it “markdown everywhere.” I take all my class notes in markdown, I write this blog in markdown (which Jekyll converts into html with very few issues), and I can convert markdown to pdfs using pandoc. Also, syntactic highlighting for code blocks is a nice feature.

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