CS371p Spring 2021: Sonali Bhat

Week 3!

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I have been thinking about the caching options we discussed in class. I’ve been working on implementing them in my Collatz assignment. I have been able to pass the Hackerrank tests using a combination of both a Lazy Cache and a Meta Cache.

What’s in your way?

I did have to do some googling about C++ syntax, since I haven’t worked in C++ for a long time. I struggled for a while on an integer overflow issue that I ended up solving by changing the data type on some of my variables.

What will you do next week?

Our Collatz project is due early next week, so I’ll be finishing up that project. I have to add some more unit tests and make sure that the formatting and documentation is up to standard. I don’t think that will take me too much time.

If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration?

I think Continuous Integration is very important. I have utilized this in my internship this past summer. I know that frequent commits with small changes that have been extensively tested is the best way to keep the code base bug free. Frequent commits also help keep the entire team on the same page about the direction the project is going.

What was your experience of Collatz?

I think Collatz is an interesting problem that we got to think about. The algorithm itself seems fairly simple, however the optimizations we discussed were really interesting. I think this was a good first project, in the sense that the algorithm itself was fairly simple, but it allowed us the chance to get used to coding in C++, as well as the chance to use software engineering tools like gcov and Valgrind.

What was your experience of exceptions?

I think exceptions are really useful to catch error paths in the code. I have used them before, but it was nice to get a refresher on it in class this past week. It’s so important to remember how to correctly order exceptions if some of them have parent/child relations. It’s also important to understand the path the code can follow through a try/catch/finally block.

What made you happy this week?

I was happy when I was able to get my code to pass all three Hackerrank tests for Project 1!

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

Reading about Continuous Integration this week reminded me to commit frequently. This will drastically reduce the amount of debugging you may have to do in the future and can also provide check points if, for any reason, you have to roll back your changes.