CS371g Summer 2021: Kyzer Polzin
What did you do this past week?
This last week I didn’t do too much. I played a little bit of tennis, worked, went to the gym a couple of times, worked on class assignments, and cooked! I made a really good sandwich for once that I thoroughly enjoyed (I’m always disappointed by simple lunch meat sandwiches cause they’re so boring, so I usually have to go to a sandwich shop to get my fix).
What’s in your way?
To be honest, not much seems to be in my way this week. I feel like I am relatively caught up in terms of all of the assignments I have coming up and nothing personal is holding me back, so hopefully this week is a good one :)
What will you do next week?
This next week, I am going to finish the Netflix project with my partner, workout, and just try to be as active as I can. I’m doing my best to enjoy summer despite having responsibilities, so hopefully I can continue to balance school, work, and fun.
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #3: Pair Programming?
This paper was good. It really convinced me of the efficiency of pair programming and kind of alleviated all of my fears in regards to pair programming. There were a couple points though that just seemed obvious in the paper, but I guess the whole point of the paper was to prove that two minds working together are more effective than two people working alone. This paper also made me question Downing’s decision for us to have different partners for each assignment this session, despite the paper clearly indicated productivity only goes up once you “gel” with someone.
What was your experience of value vs. pointer vs. reference, and Incr?
I had learned about values, pointers, and references during 429, so this was all pretty familiar to me. I didn’t quite have a grasp on how references worked though, so this past week really helped solidify that topic for me. Incr was an interesting exercise. It wasn’t necessarily difficult, but it was interesting to have to think about how to implement such a common operator ourselves. I think it was a good exercise as it solidified the concepts we went over in class.
What was your experience of Boost Serialization and RMSE?
I had no prior experience with Boost Serialization. I’m still not confident in my abilities to write a file that has been Boost Serialized, but I’m sure if I practice, I could figure it out. RMSE was an easy concept to understand. The actual exercise was a bit confusing though. My group didn’t get a perfect solution, even though the concepts of our code were super similar to the correct solution we went over in class. Other than that, RMSE wasn’t too bad to implement.
What made you happy this week?
I got miniature pancakes this last week for the first time in forever. They’re still delicious!!!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is the live-share extension on VS Code. My partner showed it to me, so we could easily collaborate on this project. It allows both users to type at the same time on the same files and even the same terminal. It’s a great tool for pair programming, so if you didn’t know about it previously, I highly recommend it.
