CS373 Spring 2021: Vincent Huynh

Week of 1 Mar — 7 Mar

1. What did you do this past week?

This past week I mainly worked on my IDB1 project, making the 14 pages and getting the initial data. I also learned how to write a little bit of batch script to automatically run many scenes through my ray tracer for CS 354.

2. What’s in your way?

I was feeling a bit worried that I missed a couple of questions on the quizzes in class this week, but I’m taking them as an opportunity to reinforce my learning. I’ll be going over the notes from class in depth this weekend to make sure I have a firm grasp on the topics discussed in class this week.

3. What will you do next week?

Next week I will be working on my Menger Sponge project for CS 354 while studying for exams. I will still work on IDB2, though, to keep making consistent progress. I’m really excited to figure out how to scrape data from our source APIs and improve on our own API design.

4. If you read it, what did you think of the Open-Closed Principle?

At first, the Open-Closed Principle didn’t make a lot of sense to me, just because I thought that there is always a possibility something will need to change. However, as I read further into the paper and through the responses to my questions, I could see that the Open-Closed Principle was, like the Single-Responsibility Principle, a good guideline to follow but not a strict requirement.

5. What was your experience of iterators and reduce2? (this question will vary, week to week)

I found iterators to be very interesting and refreshing as a topic even though I confused myself on the quizzes. I now know how iterators interact with iterables, for loops, and other iterators, as well as common use cases such as providing multiple accesses to the same iterable object.

6. What made you happy this week?

The highlight of my week was watching my sister roll the gacha on Genshin Impact and — in 10 rolls — pulling Hu Tao, the new 5-star character. The chance of that happening was 0.6%!

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

When I first learned how to use React router, I was just told to use HashRouter. However, coming back to React for IDB allowed me to compare BrowserRouter and HashRouter for myself. I found the difference was that BrowserRouter is better for websites that have a backend for getting pages, but HashRouter is more compatible with old browsers and single-page applications. This is because BrowserRouter allows refreshing the page to send a GET request while HashRouter does not for efficiency.