[09/27]CS371p Fall 2020: Roger Zhong

What did you do this past week?

I got a fair amount done this past week. I did my statistics assignments and took a mock exam, which was the professor’s way of helping us get used to online exam procedures. I also turned in the proposal document for the app we are building in my iOS class, and so far I like the idea. We are creating an app that uses a map API to allow users to pin locations for political activism, such as rallies and protests. We hope this would make organizing these events more straightforward and less reliant on twitter hashtags. I also wrote exam questions for the science competition my student org is hosting. I also started the Voting project, albeit a bit later than I planned.

What’s in your way?

Needless to say, things are picking up quick with exams, projects, recruiting, and extracurriculars all flooding in at once. I hope I can have time next week to take a break and gather my senses because I have been staying up late at night recently.

What will you do next week?

I will quickly finish and turn in the Voting project, take my statistics exam, and work on fleshing out the design for my iOS app. We’ll have to create mockups of the UI and come up with the flow between pages. At the moment, I’m not sure if we are going to draw by hand or use design software to create our mockups, so I’ll have to meet with my team and discuss.

What was your experience of values, addresses, references and consts? (this question will vary, week to week)

References are a feature of many programming languages, so I believe I have a solid understanding on how they work. However, in C++, you have the options of storing values, addresses, or creating a reference. I think that choice can be quite confusing at times, but I’ve had enough experience in the language to use them comfortable. I used pointer arithmetic very much when I was taking Operating Systems. Consts are an interesting feature of C/C++, and there are many use cases for them that I was unaware of before. There’s also that whole casting business that can make an otherwise illegal statement legal (and thus defeating the purpose of consts).

What made you happy this week?

I suppose just getting lots of work done is the thing that made me happy this week. It felt good to be highly productive for several days.

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

If you have a hot-running laptop, consider undervolting your CPU package using Throttlestop. It will take a bit of care to get things right, and I suggest looking up a guide. After, your temperatures will be a few degrees cooler and your battery will last a bit longer.