CS373 Fall 2021: Week 4 — Bren Keeton

What did you do this past week?

Pretty standard with the rest of the class, but I finished Collatz. I also did a few readings for one of my other classes, and attended lectures, but that’s about it when it comes to school-related things I did.

What’s in your way?

Other than a couple of assignment deadlines, nothing is really in my way. I expect they will be even more in my way when they get closer but I haven’t made much progress on the assignments.

What will you do next week?

I have a project due Friday for my Game Technology class that I need to finish, so I intend to get that done as soon as possible. I’m also pretty excited to get started with the semester-long project for this class. It seems really fun to be able to develop an entire website from scratch.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #4: What Happens to Us?

I think that this paper, while definitely being depressing, should be necessary reading for all students. I hope that it was the wake up call that some people needed, but also reassuring to those in this class that unfortunately have similar stories.

What was your experience of Collatz, exceptions, and types? (this question will vary, week to week)

I didn’t struggle much with Collatz, as I did it in Object-Oriented Programming, although I did have to optimize it even more than in that class given how much slower Python is than C++.

Exceptions are a little strange in Python. My knee jerk reaction to the fact that we have to raise an exception instead of throw one, or except one rather than catch is that I don’t like it, but ultimately it’s just the same design as all other exceptions just with different words. It’s also interesting that we can use the else keyword with except blocks, and finally seems useful as well.

Being able to check types is always useful so I’m glad that Python allows us to do so by default.

What made you happy this week?

My players in the D&D campaign that I am DMing for have started coming up with conspiracy theories about what exactly is going on with the current story beat, which seems like a pretty good sign that I’m doing things right despite being a beginner.

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

If you’re a senior/looking for a job, consider picking up a book about interviewing/programming problems. I really like Cracking the Coding Interview.