CS371p Spring 2021 Week 3: Yichen Zhang
What did you do this past week?
I spent time working on programming assignments for all three of my CS classes. On Tuesday, I went to the campus with my girlfriend who had to go to her in-person OChem lab. Surprisingly, there were more students studying or chilling in the area in front of Gregory Gym than I expected. Hope everybody wears masks, practices social distancing, and stays safe. Later in the week, I was searching for internships for the summer and saw some great choices.
What’s in your way?
I was trying to lose weight and have a pretty strict schedule for workouts. The biggest hurdle for me is to keep a balance between workouts and study because I prefer going to the gym at 2 or 3 pm and I got exhausted very soon after dinner. As a result, I didn’t get to finish the work I planned to do, which is a bit frustrating.
What will you do next week?
I’m going to first finish the assignments for CS classes. I need to do some testing on those programs before I turn them in. Then, my focus will be on job search and preparing for interviews.
If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration?
Continuous Integration is a great software development practice. It has become more and more popular amongst companies. It saves software developers a lot of time and effort spotting and fixing bugs. I would definitely try to practice Continuous Integration on my side projects.
What was your experience of Collatz? (this question will vary, week to week)
It was really fun. I enjoyed following the instructions by Dr. Downing. Making small changes, pushing and verifying the correctness of the code change. The biggest hurdle was to deal with C++. I had no previous experience with it though I coded in C for OS. I had to resolve some segmentation fault issues, which had been the last thing I wanted to face.
What was your experience of exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)
I used exceptions a lot when building websites. One example I can think of is to handle exceptions from HTTP responses. I do not use exceptions a lot because I do not have a lot of projects that require user input.
What made you happy this week?
On Friday, I got Roast Duck and BBQ pork from Ho Ho Chinese BBQ restaurant. Roast Duck has always been one of my favorites, and I’m so happy that the Roast Duck from Ho Ho tastes authentic and reminds me of Cantonese restaurants in Shanghai.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Z shell is an alternative to bash shell. Oh-my-zsh, an open-source zsh configuration project, provides so many themes for shell interface and useful plugins, such as git. I have been using it for two years and it really makes my programming experience a lot better.
