What are your expectations of the class?

I expect to increase my knowledge of object oriented programming and ultimately be able to design and build programs using OOP. I currently have no knowledge of C++ so I’m hoping to become very familiar with that language over the coming semester, as well as some Java refreshers. Something I always become fuzzy on in OOP is abstract classes and interfaces, so hopefully I can really nail those down in this course.

What did you do this past week?

I was not registered for the class this past week so I had to catch up on the syllabus and any material that I missed. I missed a quiz and some lecture notes, but nothing too huge. I also had to go buy the textbook for this course, which I hope will be a great resource for learning design paradigms of OOP.

What’s in your way?

I typically have a tough time adjusting to school after having weeks off, but this semester feels different. Incredibly, I’m not procrastinating on any assignments. However, the workload over all three of my CS classes will probably become more stressful throughout the semester as midterms and projects begin to clash.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will begin catching up on the readings for this course. Then I’ll start working on the first project. This project should be a nice easy start to the course, since I have done it before in Python during Software Engineering with Professor Downing. The only difficult part will be writing it in C++ since that will be new to me. Finally, I’ll be writing another blog post.

What’s my experience of the class?

Class has been pretty slow this past week, but that is only because we have been focusing a lot on the Collatz project, which I already know from Software Engineering. There is just a lot of logistics to get through, but I look forward to learning about C++ from lecture because I really enjoy Professor Downing’s style of teaching. He calls on people throughout lecture to answer questions as he is teaching, so it definitely feels more of a 1 on 1 teaching session.

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

GitHub Pages is my pick-of-the-week. This makes it incredibly easy to host a website since you just have to place an index.html file in a repository. I used it, along with Jekyll, to make this webpage for my blog.