CS371p Fall 2020: Michael Kavas

Week 4

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I started working on the voting project. My partner and I got our input parsing to work, which took longer than expected due to the nasty last line of the input that doesn’t have a newline. We also wrote a simple implementation for the solution, but we haven’t been able to properly test it yet.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is in my way at the moment, although I expect some large issue to present itself soon in the project. I also have a lot of other work and responsibilities this week, so it will be a challenge to find the time to finish this project along with everything else.

What will you do next week?

Next week I plan on continuing consistent work on project 2 so that I can finish it with time to spare. I need to finish my simple implementation and start implementing optimizations. I would like to be done with the project before next weekend, so that I can relax and begin even more soon on the next project.

What was your experience of exceptions, voting, and strcmp?

The concept of exceptions is pretty familiar, so I’ve had a pretty easy time working with them so far. The voting project is fun so far, as the problem itself is pretty interesting and not hard to think about. I wish the US had a voting system more like this. Figuring out our own schema for the CTD was extremely confusing at first, but it was actually very interesting to learn how they work and how to implement it ourselves. It would not have been possible without Branden James’ help on Piazza. I’ve seen strcmp before so that was all familiar territory as well.

What made you happy this week?

My microphone broke a while ago and I finally got around to getting a new one, which was nice because I can talk to people now without sounding like I’m under 5 feet of water. I’ve also been improving my at-home workflow, and I’ve started discovering more places to go to get work done, which keeps me much happier while doing work.

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

My pick-of-the-week is Project Euler, a series of increasingly difficult mathematical/computer programming problems. You can tackle problems of any difficulty, and you get to see how many other people have solved them. It’s a really fun and well put-together way to challenge yourself and learn.