[09/13]CS371p Fall 2020: Roger Zhong

What did you do this past week?

I completed my first iOS homework and got familiar with Swift. I started Collatz and made good progress with the code and tests. Most interestingly, I finished my first Applied Statistics homework in R. I’d say R is a fairly intuitive language and definitely easy to use for statistical calculations and analysis. In terms of formatting options, R markdown has basic features for text, graphs, and code blocks. However, LaTeX is still better for getting the exact formatting you want, especially with all the templates out there. I’m probably still clueless about R, but its way of formatting paragraphs and textblocks is a bit confusing, and the newline character is apparently two spaces(?)

What’s in your way?

There’s same issue of sticking with a schedule throughout the week and finding things to do. Also, I am going to be starting my iOS semester project soon, and I hope I can come up with an interesting and realistic project proposal with my group.

What will you do next week?

I will finish Collatz, do my M358K project, and start thinking about ideas for my iOS project. I’ll also do some recruiting related activities.

What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)

I took SWE last semester so I have experience with the concept of Collatz and its code optimizations. However, OOP is in C++, so there’s the makefile and different tools that we use for code analysis. It’s also a strongly typed language, so the implementation of Collatz is going to be slightly different as well. I have some experience with exceptions both from SWE and OS, but I still don’t use them much in practice. I do agree that exception handling is an important aspect of all programming languages, especially given the different type of exceptions and their related behaviors there are.

What made you happy this week?

I met some new people this week in the student orgs I participate in. We had our first meeting for Texas Design Journal, which is an org that crowdsources design related articles and research methodolgies from participating members.

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

If you’re at home and want to SSH into the lab machines, using winSCP makes file management and transfer so much easier. Instead of issuing SCP commands, you have a GUI that shows your filesystem and it feels almost like you’re working locally on the machine. You can also open a remote shell and run programs on the machines. However, if you want to edit a file with a something other than Vim, then you’ll probably have to transfer files over. UT has directions for using winSCP with the UT VPN, so the process should be easy.