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’s in your way? Exams start this week so I need to make time to study for those in my already busy schedule and I need to try and find a partner for the 2nd OOP project which is already online.

What will you do next week? This next week I will read a paper on Pair Programming, Chapters 5 and 6 of the textbook, and begin working on project 2. The career fairs are also fast approaching so I need to update my resume and personal website to hopefully get a summer internship.

What’s my experience of the class? I’m still enjoying the lectures and the first project was interesting but the 40 step workflow was a little overwhelming and parts of it were poorly explained which resulted in the first project taking a lot longer than it should have. Hopefully the second one is easier now that I have gone through the workflow once already.

What’s my pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? There are a lot of great front end web development tools and libraries but one I particularly like is Materialize CSS. It may not be anywhere near as powerful as others but it incredibly easy to make good looking websites with quickly so it is great fr when you don’t want to spend a ton of time fooling with other frameworks or for people like me with only minimal web development experience.