Week 5

Our "Voting" project was due Thursday of this week. I think that, along with building Pintos for our C S 439 Op. Systems class, this project makes part of the darkest hours of my C S degree. This time around, I had much more trouble getting UVa, the online judge hosted by a Spanish university, to accept my solution. And after getting it to accept it I had very little time to complete the rest of the requisites so I think it suffices to say that Thursday was an incredibly stressful and unpleasant day. One of the takeaways is definitely to start next project much earlier. However, this time around instead of having another project due in two weeks we are having our first midterm. Prof. Downing's midterms, from my experience as a former S E student, are tough... You need to study for them much differently than you do for the rest of the C S class's midterms. We will see how it goes in two Thursdays.

In class we talked about different ways you can reference variables (going very deep into the by-reference vs. by-value comparison). And we also talked about how to create a function to work generically for any data type. This is a very efficient and sexy way of coding so it's nice to learn how to be able to do it in C++. One concern I have been having lately is that I haven't been doing so hot on the quizzes. I need to keep doing the readings and staying on top of it

Week 4

Another week has gone by, it was also an intense one because of the career fair. Job hunting has officially begun, and that means info sessions, interviews, phone screens, among others; so it is an added challenge on students who are looking for either an internship or a full-time position, like myself. In class we also started discussing the next project, "Voting," which is quite the opposite of Collatz. Here, the "learning software engineering" part is really a minor thing, and it deals more with being able to crack a given problem. Downing himself said that if Collatz was 80-20 between Software Engineering skills and problem solving, then Voting is a 20-80. I already started working on it and I am a little nervous.

In class we talked a little more about overriding operators in C++, and then on Friday we had our very first guest speaker, whom actually was a Software Engineering student of prof. Downing about four years ago if I recall correctly. He came representing Bloomberg and spoke about the way that Bloomberg conducts its operations on a daily basis. It caught my attention how he said that, even though Bloomberg is associated often with Finance and the TV channel, they think of themselves more like a Data company. That's what they do really, collect data and present it. So software definitely comes in on a daily basis. He spoke about the different tools they use, including an open-source one that was created by Facebook. I thought it was a really interesting talk. I'm looking forward to meeting the rest of the guest speakers!

Week 3

This week was a little hectic given that Project 1, Collatz, was due on Thursday and there were so many requirements that we had to take care of Github wise. As Downing himself said, this was mianly a project to get us familiarized with some of the most common software engineering technologies and to polish our skills for the upcoming projects. On a frustrating note, I already got 20% of my points taken off because I apparently didn't add the TAs as collaborators even though I could've sworn I did. During class we discussed exceptions in depth (checked vs unchecked, advertising exceptions in method headers, try-catch blocks, etc.). I have been having some trouble with the quizzes because I do think some of them are trick questions, or simply things that in the moment you think that you understand completely but it is at the moment of the quiz where you actually feel you don't really know it backwards and forwards. Anyways, just have to keep doing the readings.

Project two has been announced already so we will see how that one goes. Up until now I just know that it is called "Voting" and that you can do pair programming, he said he would discuss the project on Monday. I'm kind of excited for being able to work in groups. I have done pair programming before, both in school and in my internships, and there are a lot of benefits to it. Having two pairs of eyes is always better for many reasons including error checking, ingenuity, brainstorming, etc.

Week 2

Last week was our first week in business. We started learning more about optimizations and coding conventions in C++ and always bridging the new concepts with their equivalent in Java given that most of us, UTCS students feel the most comfortable with Java.
We also started talking more in depth about Collatz, our first programming project in this class. It also goes by the name of the "3n + 1" problem, given that the claim is that given any positive number N, you will divide by 2 if N is even or multiply times 3 and add 1 if N is odd. The theory says that if you repeatedly run that loop you will arrive at 1. I guess those who have taken Software Engineering (me amongst them) had it a bit easier than the rest because Collatz is also the first project in that class; the only difference is that it is in Python. So I grabbed my Python solution and translated it to C++. I still had to come up with the logic at one point so it is still my own work. I would say that the most tedious part about this project is everything else you have to do besides the function you have to write. Because, really, this project is about getting us to feel familiarized with the repository convention that is so predominant "out there". Thankfully, I feel very comfortable with git so it's been a very pleasant first week. Can't complain! I am looking forward to the rest of the class