What did you do this past week?

This past week I started working on the Darwin project. I also finished a project for my Cyberphysical Systems course in which we had to do object recognition and tracking with the openCV library. I have also been looking up a lot of the nuances of C++ and really committing them to memory. Outside of classes, I went bowling and, oddly, played a lot of scrabble and bananagrams. In my own free time, I watched a lot of Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, which my girlfriend introduced me to last week. I’m not usually a huge fan of anime, but this show really grabbed me in the first three episodes, and I highly recommend it.

What’s in your way?

I am having some trouble working out my design for the Darwin project. I keep thinking that I have a good design and begin to build off of it. However, once I get to a certain point I feel like I could be doing it a different way that would work better, or that I could structure it a clearer way. The main problem was trying to not use any getter functions, but once I talked to Downing about it, he told me that sometimes using a getter is okay, as long as you don’t make it a consistent thing. As long as you are sure that there isn’t a better way to do it, then a getter here and there is okay.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will continue to work on and finish the Darwin project. I will also begin working on the final project for my Cyberphysical systems course. My phone interview with SailPoint got pushed back to Monday, so I will be preparing for that as well.

What’s my experience of the class?

I still very much enjoy the class. This week we learned about how to create constructors to maximize their efficiency for specific cases, such as using a move constructor or making reuse of copy assignment during a copy constructor. I overheard some people talking after class that they didn’t so much feel like these specifics really matter, and that they would prefer that the class teach us more about object-oriented design rather than these nuances of C++. I agree with them that I wish Downing would lecture on more general design principles, but the things that he teaches definitely matter. It may not be something you feel like you will use now, but you have to imagine that learning and using these techniques will separate you from the herd when it comes to making clean and efficient code in a job setting.

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

My pick of the week is DoxyDoc. This is a plugin package for Sublime text editor that automatically creates comments above classes and functions that follows the Doxygen scheme. It makes documenting during the project fairly simple.