CS371p Spring 2021: Sonali Bhat

Post #4

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I made sure that I had everything in order to submit Assignment #1: Collatz! There were a lot of requirements and I wanted to make sure I ticked all the boxes before turning the project in.

What’s in your way?

I don’t really think there is anything in my way.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I plan to take some extra time going over the topics we covered in class. I think it will take me some time to wrap my mind around the nuances of C++ and how references and addresses work together when referring to variables.

If you read it, what did you think of the Pair Programming?

I think Pair Programming can be very useful to create cleaner code faster. Personally, I have had many bugs in the past due to small issues I’ve overlooked, for example, off by one errors. These types of problems could more easily be caught as they are made if you have a partner looking over your code as you write it.

What was your experience of operators, pointers, and references?

I think pointers and references offer a lot more options and control over choosing to alter variables verses simply making a copy. I think it’ll take me some time to get comfortable utilizing them, but I plan on writing some simple code examples to see for myself what works as I expect, what doesn’t compile, etc.

What made you happy this week?

I’ve really enjoyed seeing the snow outside today! I hope to see more of it over the coming week, though hopefully without any power outages or things like that.

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

VS Code has a nice extension called Live Share! It can be super helpful if you plan to work on code with a partner. I think both parties need to have the extension installed, and one can create a session link to share with the other. I believe there are features that allow for ‘read-only’ access as well as ‘edit’ access. This will hopefully be useful as we start doing assignments with partners. Pair Programming might not be possible in the sense of actually sitting next to each other in person this semester, however with this extension, it might be possible to have a similar experience.