CS 371p Spring 2024: Scott Lai — Week 9

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I got started on the Darwin project. I just did the start-up tasks of creating the repo and importing the issues. Basically, I did everything I could do without needing to think.

What’s in your way?

Currently, the main issue is actually starting on the coding part of the assignment. My first steps will be to understand what the problem is and set up the development environment, which will some reading and pattern matching.

What will you do next week?

By next week, the set-up issues will have been closed, and I will have started coding. I first want to handle the input and output portions and then I will move on to the class design.

What did you think of Paper #9. The Dependency Inversion Principle?

These papers are getting deeper, and I’m having an increasingly harder time grasping what it is trying to get at. Nevertheless, the examples were helpful for partial understanding. As always, I found this week’s paper interesting, especially with how we are supposed to have all modules depend on abstractions instead of higher ones depending on lower ones.

What did you think of vector implementation, containers, and container adapters?

Implementing a vector seems straightforward now that I have seen how it works. Seeing as how the exercise was called Vector1, I’m curious to see what else could be added to vector to make it more complicated. It was also cool thinking about how stacks, queues, and priority queues simply adapted other previously defined containers.

What made you happy this week?

I did some sparring and got absolutely rocked by this Chinese international student, but my spinning hook kicks with my left leg are starting to look pretty good. My roommates and I decided to drive all the way out to Cedar Park to get dinner at the food court in H Mart. I had to drive, but the food was delicious. I also got lunch and dinner with some friends, old and new. All in all, I was happy to have had another light week, because the next two will be quite busy for me.

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

I came across this article about the future of software development with the advent of large language models. The author talks about frameworks for thinking about such a future and concludes with basically saying that although software development is changing, there will still be demand for developers.