CS371p Spring 2021: Erica Martinez

Week of March 11th — 28th

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I finished Allocator and studied for my AI exam. Even though spring break was a really good refresher, I wish I had done more work because I was pretty pressed for time during this week.

What’s in your way?

I feel like time is really the enemy for every single week, but I also have been falling behind on planning my weeks, so a lot of assignments are passing by me and I’m getting a bit overwhelmed. Hopefully, I can catch up a little bit before it starts getting worse.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I have an AI project due on Wednesday, so I’ll be working on that for half of my week. I will also review some lectures from other classes so that I don’t get too behind on them.

If you read it, what did you think of the Interface Segregation Principle?

I have read it before in SWE, but it was a good refresher. I think that it’s a pretty interesting topic because it’s something that is not usually seen as a problem, but it definitely is. It’s a bit difficult to see how our choices in design will create problems in the long run, but having this principle in mind will hopefully help on minimizing the chances of me creating a “fat” interface.

What was your experience of initializations, and vector?

This was my first time seeing initialization in-depth for C++. I think I may need to review the lecture again to really understand what is happening through the code, especially since I still don’t quite understand what the “explicit” keyword does. As far as vector goes, I had somewhat of an idea since I worked with them for Voting, so I had to look up a bunch of stuff and got somewhat of an understanding of how it worked under the hood once I learned it’s like Java’s ArrayList.

What made you happy this week?

This week, I started cross-stitching again! Cross-stitching is one of those crafting hobbies where you spend a lot of time because you are working on an image pixel-by-pixel, so it takes a while to do significant progress. But, I really like it because I use it as a small break in between my working times.

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

I know that this is not something that is needed for this class, but if you are working with python (like in AI or Data Mining), I recommend using Anaconda. It’s supposed to be used for data-science stuff, but I honestly like it so much that I kinda use it as my main terminal (probably bad, but it hasn’t given me issues yet). Also, you can make its window translucent so that’s a setting I enjoy.