What did you do this past week?

This past week I started and finished the Collatz project. This project took much longer than anticipated. All of my logic seemed fine, but I was still failing the last HackerRank test. I spent so much time looking for the problem, but then I realized I was making a huge mistake. I hadn’t created or ran any acceptance tests. As soon as I did I saw some incorrect cases and was able to trace the problem and fix the code. Outside of class I attended the Engineering Expo and found some companies that I can apply to for a summer internship.

What’s in your way?

As mentioned above, sometimes my approach to coding isn’t always the best. I end up wasting hours of time trying to fix something without thinking about the best way to go about fixing it. This gets in my way often because it frustrates me and diminishes my coding confidence. Something completely unrelated that might start to get in my way is that my roommate just got a new puppy. Don’t get me wrong, I love that puppy, but she requires constant attention since she isn’t house trained yet. It has become difficult to be productive at the house with her around.

What will you do next week?

Once again, I have failed to catchup on the readings. This is really frustrating to me, but to be fair I didn’t have that much free time this past week with all my work from other classes. I really hope I can knock out the reading this week. I’ll begin to look at the next project and determine how much time and effort will need to go into it. Hopefully I can motivate myself to apply to some more summer internships. Finally, I’ll be writing another blog post.

What’s my experience of the class?

Don’t take everything that is said in lecture about a project as absolute truth. I, as well as many students, assumed that using a ranges meta cache was required to make the Collatz program fast enough to pass all HackerRank tests. We assumed this because professor Downing offered it as an optimization after mentioning lazy and eager caches. It turns out a simple lazy cache was enough to pass the HackerRank tests. If I had been smart and just tried that first I wouldn’t have had improper range calculations for the meta cache. I would have been done so much faster. Moral of the story is to try the easy things first to see if they work and meet your needs before going into more complex schemes. Aside from that, lectures in this class are very enjoyable; they are very informative and interactive.

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

My pick of the week is VirtualBox. Oracle VirtualBox makes it very easy to create, run, and manage virtual machines. This was very useful to me this week when I was working on a project to attempt to freeze a computer with as little code as possible.