CS373 Fall 2021: Week 5

What did you do this past week?

I finished (and also started) the first project that was due for CS354r (Game Technology). We had to compile the engine in tools from source which was a pretty interesting process.

What’s in your way?

The next projects in both my CS classes are already due pretty soon, so I and my partners will probably be in a rush to get them done in time.

What will you do next week?

I’ll hopefully settle on a proposal idea with my IDB group, and then get started working on it. I’ll also hopefully get a response from my partners in Game Tech so we can get started on the next project in that class in time as well.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #5: Pair Programming?

Just right off the bat, the authors seemed to be really big fans of Extreme Programming, but that’s neither here nor there. The courses I’ve taken here at UT have really seemed to be trying to sell it, but I would be curious to see the numbers of how many companies actually utilize it on a large scale.

What was your experience of Python’s object model, list, tuple, set, dict, and iterators? (this question will vary, week to week)

The actual internal mechanics of each data structure seem to match those of languages like Java and C++, but the Python default method override syntax (double underscores around the name, i.e. __init__) is definitely different. Also wasn’t a big fan of the quiz questions that asked about properties of the data structures when I don’t remember us covering them in the previous lecture.

What made you happy this week?

Quite a few things actually. First of all, the fall weather finally coming to Austin is on the top of my list.

One of the players in my D&D campaign said that my combats were the first to put the fear of god in them, and I can’t imagine a better compliment.

I also had a lot of fun with my Game Tech project. Something about making something from scratch, and then actually getting to see the end product with something like a game engine just hits different than the programs that run in a terminal like other classes, although those are fun in their own way too.

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

If you plan on trying to pair program for the IDB project, but also want to code on your own machine, you can of course just screen share on Discord, but the Live Share extension for VSCode is actually really nice because you can switch drivers without having to push to and pull from the code repository when you trade off.