CS371P Spring 2020: Matthew Bianchi

Week 4

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I finished up my Collatz project and turned it in. For the final submission, I added a meta cache for every 10,000 values in the range of possible inputs, which drastically sped up the code I had written. In addition, I began work on planning for the voting project, coming up with ideas on how to solve the problem. I do not have much done for this project, but I have some good preliminary ideas on how to solve it, and I should be able to start writing code this week.

What’s in your way?

This week, I have tests in some of my other classes, and I will need to start preparing for those, which will take time away from my ability to work on this project. In addition, I will be out of town this weekend for an ultimate tournament, which will also take time away from being able to work. So my biggest obstacle this will be finding time to work on this project.

What will you do next week?

I plan to start by setting up the repository for this project and then beginning to code the most basic function that solves the problem. Once I get that completed, I can move on to implementing the basic I/O portion of this project, and then once I can parse the input, I will move on to solving the problem itself.

What was your experience of Project #1: Collatz (the problem, the overkill requirements of submission, etc.)? (this question will vary, week to week)

I felt the problem for Collatz was fairly straightforward, with plenty of room to optimize the solution. I liked the fact that we had to implement the simplest solution first, then move on to a more advanced, more optimized solution afterwards. However, the large number of issues required to be added to GitLab (I believe it was 15) seemed to be a bit much, as even though I added what felt like a large number of issues, I only just reached 15. Other than that, I feel the project was useful for introducing us into what we should expect in the course moving forward.

What made you happy this week?

Outside of this class, I had an ultimate frisbee tournament last weekend, and my team did very well at it! We went 6–3, and ended up third overall out of 10 teams. This was a great improvement from where our team was at this point last year, and I am looking forward to future tournaments, where I hope we will do just as well.

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

codecademy.com has good beginner tutorials for a variety of different programming languages. They start at a very beginner level, but go over many core concepts the language and attempt to teach you how different aspects of the language work. I used this for a basic introductory into Python a while ago, but they also have courses for C++, Java, Bash, and many other programming languages, all of which are useful if you are trying to learn the pure basics of a language.