CS371P Spring 2020: Matthew Bianchi

Week 6

What did you do this past week?

This week, most of my time for this class was dedicated to the voting project. I spent a large chunk of time working on this project, as well as studying for some midterms I have coming up. I definitely agree with Professor Downing, I found the hardest part of this project was figuring out how to read the input. Once I figured out how to do that, though, it was fairly straightforward.

What’s in your way?

In February, most of my weekends were occupied with Ultimate Frisbee tournaments out of town, so a good chunk of my work time was lost traveling to those tournaments. However, now that I don’t have any more tournaments for a while, I should now be able to focus more readily on these projects, as I will have more time available to plan for and work on them.

What will you do next week?

This coming week, we find out about our next project, and I expect to start planning the basics of this project this coming week. Even though it is due after Spring Break, I will be traveling over the break so I will not have much time to work on it. I plan on getting a head start on this so I have an easier time coming back to school after the long break.

What was your experience of containers, container adapters and iterators? (this question will vary, week to week)

I found the adaptability of containers and adapters very interesting, although I have yet to use anything besides a basic vector in any project since that is all we needed for the voting project. I do see a benefit to allowing certain containers to service only certain adapters, as it makes it impossible to have a situation like in Java where you need to QuickSort a linked list, which is extremely suboptimal. Overall, I expect these to be used more in future projects, and I find their concepts interesting.

What made you happy this week?

This past weekend was my mom’s birthday, so I went home to celebrate with her. I always enjoy being able to head back home, and it was great being able to talk with them and hang out for a little.

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

My tip of the week is to avoid procrastination as much as possible. This has been an issue I’ve been struggling with for a while in many of my classes and it always comes back to haunt me on the due date.