CS373 Spring 2020: Sonali Bhat

Post #2!

What did you do this past week?

I haven’t had the chance to do much work on Project #1 (Collatz) yet, due to other assignment deadlines from other classes. I do plan to start this weekend! This past week, I’ve been mainly learning more about continuous integration and unit tests. I’ve learned about how to make unit tests more useful using the tool, Coverage.

What’s in your way?

There’s nothing really in my way regarding this class, aside from other deadlines keeping me from starting this project already. It is a little intimidating to have so many things on the rubric involving Git and CI and other tools that I’ve never used before, however I am looking forward to gaining proficiency in using them.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I hope to make significant progress on Project #1. I plan to start with setting up the Docker image that Professor Downing has provided so I can use all the tools necessary. I also want to get more comfortable with Gitlab.

What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, coverage, and continuous integration?

I have never used continuous integration or coverage before, however I’m definitely seeing their uses and benefits. I have utilized assertions and unit tests before, however I think this class is teaching me place and frame them to be most effective.

What made you happy this week?

I really enjoyed learning about the various equations and optimizations Professor Downing discussed in class regarding the Collatz problem. Some of them seemed especially clever to reduce the run time.

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

Continuous Integration is important! Everything goes a lot more smoothly when people commit often and conflicts are resolved quickly! If people communicate and commit often, everyone knows the current state of the project at any point in time. It makes finding and fixing bugs a lot easier too, which is important because bugs tend to hide other bugs when they aren’t fixed in a timely manner. I think we can all agree that it is 1,000,000 times harder to search and fix bugs in large sections of code versus testing smaller sections of code as we go.

Hope everyone had a good second week of classes!