CS373 Spring 2021: Vincent Huynh

Week of 1 Feb — 7 Feb

1. What did you do this past week?

I worked on the Collatz project a lot this week and got all the test cases to pass on HackerRank. I’ve finished most of the project and got my acceptance tests merged with the Collatz tests repository.

2. What’s in your way?

I spent a lot of time this week trying to compile my ray tracing project for CS 354. It was my first time using CMake and Visual Studio. Although it was tough, I figured it out the next day when I had a fresh mind. I did learn a lot about building C++ projects, so I think it was worth the short struggle.

3. What will you do next week?

I will be finishing Collatz over the weekend and making sure everything is ready to turn in on Monday. For the rest of the week, I plan to mainly focus on my ray tracing project for CS 354 in terms of coding, although I’ll always try to balance my work every day between classes.

4. If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration?

I thought it was an informative read, but it felt a little strange given it was from 2006. I assume Git was not used widely at the time, and a google search told me Git was created in 2005. The article made me very excited about CI, and the part about secondary testing and speeding up building was especially interesting.

5. What was your experience of Collatz?

I knew about the odd number optimization from the Numberphile video on Collatz, but the range reducing optimization was very interesting to learn about for the first time. I never realized that there were so many options for caching either, and I decided to use 2 types in my Collatz implementation: precomputed and intermediate values.

6. What was your experience with exceptions?

I knew about how exceptions worked in Java, but the lecture was a great refresher. Learning about exceptions in Python helped broaden my overall understanding as well.

7. What made you happy this week?

I came back to playing Valorant this week. It was fun to return and play with some friends that are new to the game, as it was a relearning process for me, too.

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

There is a great VSCode extension called SFTP by liximomo. I used it to more easily work with my files on the lab machines last year. When school went online, it stopped working. However, I spent a few hours this week looking at it more closely and actually got it working again!