CS373 Fall 2020: Week of September 7 — September 13
What did you do this past week?
This week I got started and made a lot of progress on the Collatz project. I’m not finished yet as it’s due tomorrow, but the only work I have left to do on it are housekeeping items such as formatting with black. I also completed the weekly reading, attended class, and now have written the weekly blog post.
What’s in your way?
Currently not much, but I recently overcame some frustrating errors trying to optimize Collatz and get the project to actually build in the GitLab CI/CD pipeline. It’s possible that a lack of knowledge over the tools I’ll have to use to wrap up this project could be an issue, but hopefully not a large one.
What will you do next week?
Next week I will again attend class and complete the readings and blog post. I also must wrap up and submit Collatz.
What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)
To start, my experience of Collatz was pretty good — I think Dr. Downing did a good job of creating a project where we can learn some Python and some of the development tools we’ll be using for the semester without having to stress to much about overly complicated code. This made the project manageable time-wise.
The starter code and make file were straightforward and easy to understand without a massive time investment, which was handy since there was a learning curve to tools like Docker and GitLab required for the project.
The optimizations also provided a good experience. They brought back some useful knowledge from Algorithms and Data Structures and helped me learn more about python without being too challenging.
What made you happy this week?
The NFL and Premier League are both back!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pic of the week is this website: https://www.keybr.com/
Previously, I was unable to type correctly. I used only 2–4 fingers at a time and my typing speed was probably around 20–30 WPM. Using this website for the past two weeks, I’ve been able to learn proper touch typing and now type around 50 WPM. Still not spectacular, but a big improvement.
