CS371p Spring 2021: Week 2

What did you do this past week?

This past week I set up all of my routines because I moved into my West Campus apartment last week. Overall, I have been mostly doing homework, cooking for myself, and spending some time setting up my coding workflow.

What’s in your way?

Honestly, my own lack of productivity is in my way. I have so many things that I want to do in a day, but I get unfocused very easily, so I’ve been starting instituting frequent, but short breaks to help me stay productive. I started this week and it’s incrementally been helping my productivity.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I will begin digging into the Collatz project and really start dissecting it. In addition, with all of my other classes ramping up and my other organizational responsibilities, I’ll have to be better about frontloading my work and balancing it out.

If you read it, what did you make of the makefile?

Initially, it seemed extremely daunting as it's just a bunch of commands thrown at you. However, after careful reading, the makefile is followable and understandable. I think it’s interesting to read all of the commands that are happening under the hood and it’s definitely good practice for when we have to write our own makefiles.

What was your experience of Docker?

I’m honestly a huge fan of Docker. Even before this class, I have used it with setting up a local image of a database for local testing and it is honestly a huge lifesaver and a really great software tool. For our class, I have set up Professor Downing’s image on my machine, making it extremely easy to use the tools that are required for the project.

What was your experience of assertions?

I have never used assertions in my code, but after learning about them during class this past week, I believe they are extremely valuable at least for pre and post-condition checks. However, they can not be used in place for unit tests.

What was your experience of unit tests?

At my internship, last summer, the importance of unit tests was essentially drilled into me from my first day. Unit tests are so incredibly important as they can save so much time and hassle and they ensure that no buggy code will be live on production for customers to see. I have used multiple JS unit test libraries, but I’m interested to learn more about them in C++.

What made you happy this week?

This past week, I got to present a software solution for UT Student Government that a team of 6 and I have been working on for the past ten months. It was super humbling to see all of the work our team put in and finally see it live and in use. Check out our work here: www.utsgconnect.com!

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

My pick-of-the-week would be to use Spring Boot as a backend technology to build your own REST API. I personally have always been incredibly bullish on AWS Lambda as it is serverless, but the perk of local development is incredibly important as a software developer. In addition, Spring Boot uses Java, so it has been nice to do some refreshing on the language. Below I’ve linked a tutorial video I used to learn the basics of Spring Boot!