CS373 Spring 2021: Vincent Huynh

Week of 22 Feb — 28 Feb

1. What did you do this past week?

This week I spent my time catching up on classwork that was shifted back due to the winter storm and meeting with my project group for IDB to finish our proposal. I also worked ahead while I was waiting for updated due dates on assignments for my other classes in order to make more time for working on IDB next week.

2. What’s in your way?

At the time of writing this blog, our proposal has not been approved yet, so I can’t really begin the next steps for the project. I think we forgot to answer a question on our proposal, so I’ll get to answering that soon.

3. What will you do next week?

I am very excited to start working on the project once it is approved. I will be familiarizing myself with Postman and working with REST APIs this weekend. I think there were some resources posted on Piazza and Canvas, but I’ll also do some research on my own as well.

4. If you read it, what did you think of the Single Responsibility Principle?

I think it’s very important to separate classes based on responsibilities. In my experience, it makes debugging much easier because making a change will cause fewer side effects since responsibilities are not coupled and interferences between classes are minimized.

5. What was your experience of IDB1 and reduce? (this question will vary, week to week)

I feel like IDB1 will take the most getting used to as my group works out a schedule for the week, but I am looking forward to working with them. I already knew about reduce and how it works, but it was interesting to think that no extra handling was needed to handle the case of an empty iterable being passed in.

6. How did you fare in the storm?

The first few days I had 1 hour of electricity every 8 hours and then every 4 hours over the following days. It was pretty rough, but I managed to stay productive by reading books and playing my musical instruments.

7. What made you happy this week?

My cousins stayed over for a few days during the winter storm, which made the long power outages much more bearable. However, it was because the pipes in their house burst from water freezing inside that they came over in the first place, so I can’t say I was happy about that part.

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

A lot of times programming knowledge is found online through videos, websites, eBooks, and PDFs, but sometimes reading books can be a great source as well. When my electricity was out, I took some time to read Structure and Interpretations of Computer Programs 2nd Edition by Abelson and Sussman and found it very interesting.