What did you do this past week?
This past week, I spent some time working on Project #2. Having become more familiar with the development environment from Project #1, the process of setting up this project was much more streamlined. I was able to get through with implementing the naive solution in less time than I spent setting up GitLab issues for Project #1!
What’s in your way?
The biggest thing in my way right now is, again, homework from other classes. It is a very difficult balancing act to make sure I have time to complete all of my assignments before they’re due; especially now, with one of my other classes assigning a sizeable project.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I would like to finish Project #2 in, hopefully, a lower-stress environment than last week. My partner and I both had some scheduling issues, so it would be nice to get the majority of the work done earlier in the week rather than later.
What did you think of Paper #5: The Single Responsibility Principle?
I’d been thinking a lot about the topic of the paper before knowing it had a name. I was working on a personal project recently that had a situation very similar to one presented in the paper (I had a geometric object that had a coupled responsibility to do math and render itself to the screen). At first, I made the attempt to couple these two behaviors, but it ultimately became too confusing to keep track of changes in each piece of the program. So, in the end, I caved to the single responsibility principle and wrote two separate classes — one to handle the math and one to handle the rendering.
What was your experience of arguments and const? (this question will vary, week to week)
Some of the design choices for C++ are a bit confusing to me, but I am slowly becoming accustomed to the language’s quirks. I just wish the naming for const types and references where a bit more indicative of their behavior. For example, instead of the out-of-left-field const int* and int* const (why on earth would const ever come after the name of the type?!?), they could have followed the same naming convention as type casting, and maybe incorporated template syntax for clarity (e.g. const_ptr<int>, static_ptr<int> , etc.).
What made you happy this week?
This week, I was happy to finally have some kind of get-together with my friends. The physics department hosts a yearly “Physnic”, and, despite not being a physics major myself, I decided to stop by (they had free food). Afterwards, a couple friends and I played Smash after the picnic.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is Upterm, an application for secure terminal sharing. After having some issues with tmate, my partner and I for Project #2 decided there must be a better way to share our terminals during pair programming sessions. We found Upterm to be the way to go; all sharing is done over SSH, and there is no restriction of hosting everything in a shoddy tmux fork (which can’t even load a typical .tmux.conf).
