Parts of this summery were taken from previous weekly blog posts

What did you do this past week? This week we read two articles by Joel Spolsky. The first was called The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing and talked about how companies should go about interviewing candidates and selecting which ones to hire. The second was Getting Your Resume Read and discussed some tips and common mistakes to avoid when sending your resume to companies. In class we talked about conditions in which Java and C++ use static v dynamic binding, consequences of pure virtual methods, handle classes, shared pointers, and unique pointers.

What did you do this past week? This week we read two articles. The first was called A Woman’s Place and discussed the career of Sheryl Sandberg and her efforts to encourage more woman to get into the tech industry. The second was called I Need More Terrible Female Engineers and said we need to encourage more woman to are not exceptionally skilled to enter the tech industry so other woman can see that it isn’t just exceptional woman who can be successful. We finished the Life project that my partner and I began last week and discussed Method Overriding, Virtual methods, and Dynamic Casting in class. I registered for classes this week. Currently I’m registered to take Artificial Intelligence, Intro to Wireless Networks, British Literature, Foundations of Accounting, and Foundations of Business Law and Ethics next semester and I’m on the waitlist for computer networks to replace Wireless Networks. Additionally I filled out the proctor application for next semester. I’d love to proctor a class again since I really enjoyed it this semester but unfortunately the professor I’m currently proctoring CS312 for isn’t teaching again next semester.

What did you do this past week? This week we read papers on What Should We Teach and the Joel Test. What Should Teach discussed the importance of schools teaching practical programming and The Joel Test contains a list of twelve practices that every successful software development team should have. In class we went over the fifth project, Life, which involves implementing Conway’s game of Life, Fredkin’s game of Life, and a handler class to allow a mix of the cells from each. We also discussed an example of a shape class and a circle that extends it as an example of various object oriented programming concepts. Finally my partner and I began work on the Life project. This weekend I went to Music Hacks and built an mobile game where you try and recreate songs for other people to guess using random sound effects.

What did you do this past week? This week we read a paper on Why Extends is Evil and two on Why Getters and Setters are Evil. These papers stressed adherence to object oriented design methodology and explained how classes extending each other and overuse of getter and setter methods can negate proper design. This helped explain why were were not supposed to use getter and setter methods in the 4th programming project which we finished this week. In class we discussed r value constructors, function overloading, and applied these to our vector example from last week.

What did you do this past week? This week we read papers on Granularity and Stability, began working on the fourth project, and went over how to implement a vector class both with and without an allocator function. Additionally three people from Atlassian gave a talk Monday nigh. The began by discussing the various products that Atlassian makes to allow people to better work together including Jira, Bitbucket, and HipChat. Net they talked about some technical problems they faced in HipChat regarding showing if users were online or not. I though this part of the talk was really interesting as it went over some interesting real world challenges they faced and various possible solutions. Finally they discussed what it was like to work at Atlassian. I thought the company sounded interesting and like a fun place to work but I don’t think I would like to work there since they focus very heavily on teamwork and collaboration and make their software engineers be on call to fix issues.

What did you do this past week? This week we read a paper on the The Dependency Inversion principle and discussed larger class structures and the friend permission in C++. I completed the Allocator project which involved simulating a heap and performing allocations and deallocations on it.

What did you do this past week? This week we read a paper on the Interface Segregation Principle which states that objects should not inherit interfaces that they do not use. In class we discussed our third project which involves simulating a heap and discussed Allocating objects on the heap. Outside of oop we finished our inverted pendulum project in Cyberphysical Systems, I had my second chem exam, and I graded Assignment 5 for CS312.

What did you do this past week? We had our first exam this week. In addition to that we read a paper on Th Liskov Substitution Principle which involves allowing constructs that take in an instance of a class to also take in a instance of a child of that class. In class we went over an example of how to write a range iterator and outside of class we wen to a talk where two people from Mutual Mobile talked about some of the challenges of mobile development and how to employ proper design principles to allow for apps to evolve over time.

What did you do this past week? This week for Object Oriented programming I read a paper on the Open-Closed Principle. The open closed principle says that modules within a program should be open for extension but closed for modification. We also discussed mean squared error and how classes, structs, and levels of protection work within c++. I went over some material for the exam on March 2nd although I made less progress than I would have liked since I also had to proctor and grade exams from CS312.

What did you do this past week? This week I completed the 2nd Object Oriented Programming project, The project involved implementing a program to run an Australian Ranked Preferential voting system. Like the previous project it was written in c++ and travisCI and github were used during development. For class we read a paper on the Single Responsibility principle and discussed iterators, lambdas, and constant variables and pointers. Outside of oop I had my first exam in Government and completed our first project using the self driving car in Cyberphysical Systems. I also went to the career fair, career night, and began applying to more companies online.

What did you do this past week? This week we discussed the second project for oop which involves creating a program to determine the winner in a ranked preferential voting system. We read a paper on Pair Programming practices and discussed topics relating to pointers, templates, and arrays in c++. Outside of oop I had my first exam of the semester in Chem and made progress getting our car to move at a specified speed in Cyberphysical Systems.

What did you do this past week? This week I completed my first project for Object Oriented Programming. Project 1 involved finding the largest chain generated by the Collatz Conjecture less than a specified value in an efficient manner. To accomplish this I had to cache both the largest values to to that number and the length of each chain as well as metacacheing the 6 values less than five million. This project also required use of Github, TravisCI, Doxygen, and a clang formatter. We also had a guest speaker in class that talked about working at Bloomberg. Outside of oop my battlecode team just missed making it to the in person finals (won the 1st round but lost the 2nd and 3rd of a best of 3 that would have gotten us there) but we still finished in the top 24 of almost 1200 teams which I consider quite an accomplishment since it was all of our first times doing the contest.

What did you do this past week? This week in Object Oriented Programming we read papers on how to be successful as a CS student in college and on the software bug that caused the explosion of the European Space Agency’s Arian 5 rocket. We discussed more concepts relating to C++ programming and I began working on the first project. The first project began with setting up travisCI, a tool which I had never used before, in a git repository and then involved solving a programming problem while maintaining proper use of git and travis. Outside of OOP I taught my first discussion sections for CS312, graded quizzes, started grading programming assignments, and worked on getting the final version of our battlecode player ready.

What did you do this past week? Since this week was the first week of the semester class wasn’t that eventful. We went over some of the basics of C++, some of the tools we will be using in the class including Docker and Travis, and looked at some examples of how operators are evaluated. Outside of this class I nailed down my classes for the semester: OOP, Cyberphysical Systems, Gov 312L, and Chem 301 as well as Proctoring CS312 Introduction to Programming. I also worked on my player for the Battlecode contest and we had our first tournament.