CS371p Fall 2021: Sruthi Rudravajjala

What did you do this past week?

This past week I worked on the voting project with my partner. After running into some issues we were able to debug but that was the most time consuming part of the project. Going to help hours was the most helpful because we learned some tricks about recreating errors in our own terminals to test the code. This was especially useful because Hackerrank tests are so opaque.

What’s in your way?

I’ve been having trouble with the makefile and ctd file for this project. We were able to write a python script to generate acceptance tests but the ctd syntax has been confusing.

What will you do next week?

Next week I’ll submit the voting project and hopefully work on things for other classes. I’m hoping we won’t start project three for another week.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #6: Single Responsibility Principle?

The paper this week did a good job of summarizing some design concepts I hadn’t encountered before. In the intro computer science classes we talk about encapsulation but I always thought that responsibilities and actions are the same but the paper was more specific about what classes should contain. I also read this paper in CS 373 but I think it is a useful paper to read every so often.

What was your experience of stack, queue, priority_queue, values, pointers, and references?

Stack, queue, priority queue, and values were all pretty straightforward for me. The lecture about pointers and references was a little confusing because I’ve forgotten about pointers from C. The lecture on Friday really clarified all of my confusion but I need to look at examples on my own to prepare for the next quiz. I might also go to office hours to review.

What made you happy this week?

This week I got to attend the Grace Hopper conference. It was virtual, but still a good experience. I listened to some keynote speakers who talked about AI research and project management which I found especially interesting.

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

My tip of the week is to break up study time into chunks with short breaks in between. I sometimes use a google chrome extension called pomodoro which times 25 minute chunks with 5 minute breaks in between and a larger 15 minute break every so often. It helps me a lot when I’m studying or working on tedious work like textbook reading.