CS 371p Spring 2021: Week 3

Week 3 Reflections

What did you do this past week?

This past week was certainly busier than the previous two. The first thing I did was install Docker. This also required that I upgrade to WSL2, which is probably a good thing to do anyways, but was a bit of a pain to accomplish. What should have been a simple tutorial following turned into a frustrating journey of figuring out why the heck this thing won’t just work (as these sorts of endeavors often do). It turns out virtualization wasn’t even enabled on my computer, so I had to go into the BIOS to enable it. But I did finally get Docker installed and working, and have had minimal troubles using it. Then there was the experience of the Collatz project, but since there’s an entire question dedicated to that I’ll hold off until then.

What’s in your way?

Time is the biggest factor at this point. It just seems that there are so many things to do and never enough time to do them all. But such is life I suppose. The things will get done one way or another, or maybe they won’t, and sometimes that’s OK too.

What will you do next week?

I will definitely be cramming to finish Collatz. I’ve got the basics done, but actually passing the HackerRank test cases is a much larger challenge. It’s possible (maybe even probable) that I’m a single breakthrough away from being done with it all. For now, however, the end still seems far off.

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

It definitely seems like a good idea, and the arguments presented in the paper were solid. The article is nearly fifteen years old now, so it’d be interesting to see what’s changed since then and how widely continuous integration has caught on (I suspect very widely).

What was your experience of Collatz?

Collatz certainly is an interesting beast. It seems like such a simple problem, and yet no mathematician has been able to prove the conjecture true and it’s not exactly trivial to implement efficiently for large ranges of numbers. Apart from just the problem, I think the project itself is a good introduction to the workflow for this class, as well as a variety of tools that will prove useful in this class and beyond.

What was your experience of exceptions?

Exceptions certainly seem useful and I definitely see why they exist. Without having used them too extensively, I’m not sure I have a whole lot more to say about them, though.

What made you happy this week?

I got some ice cream from the grocery store this week and it’s quite good. I would highly recommend Blue Bell ice cream.

What’s your pick-of-the-week?

Go to bed at a consistent time. I’ve noticed that some people will glorify or take pride in staying up really late grinding their assignments, especially CS students working on coding projects. I don’t really get it. When you stay up late you work less efficiently and do lower quality work. Moreover, you just end up sleeping in later that next day, or worse, sleep less. Though it might be necessary every once in a while, I get the sense that many people are guilty of doing this much too frequently.