23 Sep – 29 Sep

What did you do this past week?

This week, scheduled some meetings to work on the latest project. So far we’ve handled the read methods (which I guess means we’re halfway done), and outlined how we intend to implement the voting results computation.

What’s in your way?

Well, right now it’s the fact that WordPress is lagging like a brother hugger. How hard is it to put text into HTML? But as for the assignment, not much is in our way. We got things planned, and now we just need to implement them, and hope that we don’t run into any problems. Sorry, this WordPress thing is really making me low-energy. Usually I try to make these blogs a little more entertaining. But I just don’t feel like it right now. This a phoned-in post. Enjoy.

What will you do next week?

Hello from Notepad. WordPress keeps jumping to the top of the page whenever I write anything down, so I’m gonna have to MacGyver this mess. Anyway, what was the question? Oh yeah, um, we’ll probably implement the actual voting computation process, do some debugging, then add in some unit and acceptance tests, *checks rubric*, add those tests to the public test repo, then do all the miscellaneous things we have to do, like doxygen and astyle.

What was your experience in learning about stack-allocated arrays, heap-allocated arrays, and equal()?

I usually prefer languages like C++ and Java over things like Python, mainly because I like having a small set of fundamental rules (pointers, inheritance, lambdas) rather than a bunch of tools that someone else made that you could possible replicate yourself (tuples, those weird parameter things python does, like unpacking and named parameters). That stuff feels so toy-box-y. But the fact that using int[] is slightly different from int*, and that there are already-built methods like equal and fill, which you could somewhat easily implement yourself, kinda skews C++ over into toy box territory. I mean, it’s not that bad. Might even be a bit helpful. But I still feel like some of that good ol’ C++ No Nonsense spirit is a little tainted.

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

Here is a talk given by Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering. It mostly intended as advice for videogame design, but it can also apply to software development, especially when it comes to user experience. Give it a watch, it’s pretty good.