CS371p Spring 2021 Week 4: Yichen Zhang

What did you do this past week?

Last week I was just chilling. I finished most homework at the beginning of the week. Lunar New Year came up, which is the biggest holiday since I was born in China. I spent some time watching the annual Chinese Spring Festival Gala, which reminded me of the time when the whole family came together and celebrated New Year. Unfortunately, I don’t remember receiving red packets, which I am wondering might be stolen by my mom.

What’s in your way?

According to the weather forecast, it’s going to be freezing starting from Sunday. One guy told me he has never seen this for a long time in Texas. I don’t think the infrastructure here in Austin is designed to stand this level of coldness and there are apartments on West Campus where the electricity goes off. I hope the electricity stays next week.

What will you do next week?

I’m going to attend the CNS career fair and career night. I’ll try to apply to as many companies as possible.

If you read it, what did you think of the Pair Programming?

I think Pair Programming is a great programming practice. I’m using it on Autonomous Driving projects, and it has largely reduced the total amount of time and improved the correctness of the implementation.

What was your experience of operators, pointers, and references? (this question will vary, week to week)

Operators I believe were first introduced in CS312. Trying to figure out the type of arguments and return value of operators is at a different level. In terms of pointers and references, I got familiar with them in Computer Architecture and OS.

What made you happy this week?

Celebrating Chinese New Year really made me happy. I got to chat with friends from high school online and talk about how we celebrated the festival before. It was good times.

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

Visual Studio Code has several useful tools that can be used for better collaboration. Live Share allows for pair programming remotely. SSH helps you open any directories on a remote server using SSH, which is really useful if you are working with lab machines. Or you can use SFTP to sync directories from remote server to local computer.