CS371p Week 4

What did you do this past week?

I completed the work on my Collatz project and turned it in. The last steps I had involved writing tests, cleaning up the code, and making sure everything was as it should be in GitLab.

What’s in your way?

I don’t believe that I have anything in my way at the moment. The biggest things I’m worried about are the freezing weather and whether it will affect my electricity, and by extension access to the internet.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will take the days off to go over everything we’ve been over in class so far to make sure that I fully understand the material. I don’t know when we’ll get our next project, but if we are assigned it next week I will definitely start work on it. If not, I will continue working on projects for my other classes.

If you read it, what did you think of the Pair Programming?

This wasn’t my first introduction to Pair Programming. My Operating Systems professor, Dr. Norman, also stressed the benefits of it. Still, it was interesting to get an in-depth look at all of the benefits and the rules for making it work. It’s interesting the difference between this week’s paper and last week’s. Last week covered Continous Integration, and I would argue that it is a much more widely adopted practice. Meanwhile, I think that pair programming is still quite rare unless it’s just a temporary working condition to fix a bug.

What was your experience of operators, pointers, and references?

I have worked with c and c++ before, so I was already pretty familiar with pointers and references, so it was no great effort to understand those. For operators, I have of course used them, but I haven’t put a lot of deep thought into understanding them as we did in the lecture. It was very interesting, and I’m excited to learn more about overloading operators.

What made you happy this week?

I went down to Corpus Christi to visit my family. It was great to spend time with them, even if the weather was freezing. The good food definitely made up for it, though.

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

Be very careful in PyTorch when using F.softmax. It can mess up your computational graph and make it so none of your weights update.