CS373 Fall 2020 Week 4: Caitlin O’Callaghan
- What did you do this past week?
This past week I finished up the Collatz project after passing all the tests! I was very happy about this especially after technical issues delayed my starting the project. I also formed a group for project 2 and we scheduled 2 meetup times over the weekend. In the first meet up we generated a lot of ideas and I’m very excited about the project.
2. What’s in your way?
This week I haven’t found anything to be “in my way” particularly. I did get overwhelmed with work from my other classes, though and fell out of my routine/good habits. One thing I didn’t do that I would have liked to do was review my notes from the previous class before class to be more prepared for the quizzes.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week my group and I will continue to meet up to make as much progress as possible. I think we are all interested in starting early especially because none of us have too much experience in web development. I also plan to review my notes more consistently and try to achieve a more balanced routine across all of my classes.
4. What was your experience of exceptions, IDB1, and types?
My experience of exceptions was that they are used in the context of user facing errors rather than assertions, so that the program does not halt and the user can understand what went wrong/if they need to re-input something. For IDB1, my group met up to brainstorm ideas and see which ones were the most interesting and which ones would meet the requirements for the models. This week I learned that python uses a tree of types with object at the root, while java has a tree of classes with object at the root, and that java has a lot of built in types.
5. What made you happy this week?
Finally having a laid back weekend made me really happy. I feel like I had time to relax and work on some homework ahead of time at a nice pace. I also had time to practice oboe and violin :).
6. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is this article https://theconversation.com/a-new-kind-of-physics-stephen-wolfram-has-a-radical-plan-to-build-the-universe-from-dots-and-lines-136830 talking about Stephen Wolfram’s plan to represent the entire universe using graphs in the hopes of developing a “new” kind of physics. It’s a very interesting read.
