What did you do this past week?

As far as work for this class goes, not much. I turned in the project on canvas. I also made some last minute changes to fix a minor pipeline error and rework some of my acceptance tests. But in terms of my workload, most of it was put towards other classes.

What’s in your way?

Right now I just have to schedule the meeting times with my partner to work on the next project. Then go to those meetings and work on the project.

What will you do next week?

Well, I guess I’ll schedule the meeting times with my partner to work on the next project. Then I’ll go to those meetings and work on the project.

What was your experience in learning about consts and SOLID?

Lots of constants. Very good. Very nice. Usually don’t need that many constants, but glad to know that they’re there. Never thought of pointers to constants. Never used them. Never tried them, no sir, not me. Knew a fellow once. Lived in the mountains. A mountain man. Wore a straw hat and a singular boot. Used to point to constants all the time. Pointed day and night. Pointed at all kinds of constants. If you had a constant, you could bet your shiniest nickel he was pointing at it. Folks thought he was crazy. Called him Pointer-man Jim. Name wasn’t even Jim. Been a while since I last saw of Jim. Years at least. Sometimes, as I’m going through my daily tribulations, the thought of ole Jim comes to mind. Can’t help but chuckle. Probably still out there, ole Jim, somewhere up in those hills, hat on his head, boot on his foot, finger held high to the heavens, pointing towards that great white moon above, like God’s eye, gazing down the way it does, always has, and shall ever be.

Also the SOLID talk was pretty good. Lots of good advice, I found it very informative.

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

Throughout the last lecture, while Downing was talking about the problem, all that I could think about was this video. It is CGP Grey doing an example walkthrough of STV voting. It is a little different from what we’re trying to do (50% threshold, 1 seat, no initial distribution of excess votes) but it if you ever find yourself confused about how exactly our voting algorithm is supposed to work, this is probably a good way to intuit it.

What did you do this past week?

I modified my Collatz eval method to work with the given metatable (always autocorrects to metastable, which is *looks it up* a stable state that is not necessarily a state of least energy, like a bowling pin that hasn’t been knocked down yet, or a ball resting at a local minimum that is not the global minimum. Reminds me of machine learning.). I also changed the code to allow for i>j so I could pass the HackerRank tests. Made a program to make some acceptance tests, then made some unit tests that act fairly similar to acceptance tests. Then I did all of the miscellaneous things we had to do, like doxygen, astyle, log, cppcheck, and updating the README!

What’s in your way?

I need to turn in the project on Canvas. I can’t turn in the project on Canvas. It won’t let me until… seven and a half hours from now. I don’t know why. I thought we just submit the URL for our project, which shouldn’t change that much. You can just submit the URL a week in advance and change the project as you go, that way you don’t forget to turn it in. But they locked the assignment until the day before its due, which seems a bit out of the way, so I guess there might be a good reason for doing that.

What will you do next week?

Turn in this project. Then start on the next project, whatever that will be.

What was your experience in learning about Google Test, gcov, exceptions, pointers, and references?

I wouldn’t really call it “learning” Google Test. Really I just copied and modified the tests that were given. gcov just seems to give stats that make no sense (How do you execute 95% of all lines and 100% of all branches, and yet only execute 77% of all calls). I already learned how exceptions work from Software Engineering. I also already knew most of what we learned about pointers and references, except that you can declare references to set up an alias, which I can’t see a use case other than for parameter passing, but I guess uses might exist.

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

There is this YouTube channel called javidx9 (also known as One Lone Coder) that makes a lot of do-it-yourself coding tutorials. Right now I recommend his series on creating your own 3d graphics engine.

What did you do this past week?

I forked and cloned the git repo, made the issues, made a simple solution to the problem, committed that (while closing some issues along the way), and then made a program to create the metatable. Oh, I also downloaded the packages that this project uses, which filled me with an unearned sense of pride.

What’s in your way?

I haven’t started on actually using the metatable in the Collatz evaluation method. It seems to mostly be an issue of finding out where the bounds are of the subranges within a given range, or something like that. I have some ideas on how I’ll implement it. It’s just one of those problems that you don’t really want to do because it seems a so nebulous, but once you do actually start then the solutions, or at least the problems, become a lot clearer. So I guess you could say, the only thing that’s in my way, is myself.

What will you do next week?

I will solve the problem mentioned above, then do all of the auxiliary tasks that I normally wouldn’t do but have to do for this class because they’re good-practice and in the long run will save me a lot of effort, even though it fills my insides with exasperated groans and sighs loud enough to be heard across the astral plane.

What was your experience in learning about assertions and going over the Collatz project?

I was in Software Engineering, so this is the second time that I have been explained this stuff. So I guess I would describe the experience as being a load off my brain.

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

In general I recommend the Youtuber Tom Scott. If you don’t already know about him, he makes a bunch of interesting educational videos about history, physics, computer science, etc. If you specifically want something about software development, I recommend his series on how to build an app. It gives you a bunch of advice regarding each phase of app creation, from development to maintenance to marketing (and also about how it’s usually not a good idea to build an app). He also did some stuff with computerphile, like how electronic voting machines are a bad idea or how internationalization is such a headache to code into your program.

Hello. My name is Jacob Kennedy. I was born in Pearland, Texas, and have lived there for most of my life. I am currently in college as a CS major to become a software developer. My preferred languages are Java and C, though I can work with Python and HTML.

As far as extracurriculars go, I play classical guitar and piano. I am also trying to learn Spanish (Puedo leer y escribir basante bien, pero me confundo cuando escucho a hispanohablantes, asi que no esperes tener una conversacion coherente).

I am taking this class because, well, I need a CS credit and this is one of the few classes that provides that. Also, even though I have worked in C++, I’d like to become more familiar with it’s object-oriented side, which I guess is the objective of this class.