CS371p Fall 2020: Nathan Jackson
3 min readOct 3, 2020
- What did you do this past week? — This past week I wrapped up development on the Voting project. Most of the work was done last Saturday, while the work this week was running the make commands to reformat and clean code up before submitting the project to Canvas. Outside of class, I took some time to review pointers and references to have a more solid understanding of them. Then, I started on the Allocator project today. This project builds a heap with a stack allocator, and mostly explores OOP features like customizing default constructor behavior and customizing the behavior of operators. I forked the gitlab repository and have added issues to my repo. I’ve also cloned and started looking at the test cases included to better understand the code.
- What’s in your way? — I have a couple of questions about the implementation of the allocator that I have posted to Piazza. My development is pretty much limited until I understand the basic operations that the allocator should perform. With a good foundation, the more complex operations shouldn’t be difficult to implement.
- What will you do next week? — Next week I’m planning to continue my development of the Allocator project and submit before next Friday. Once the basics of the project are sorted out, the rest of the project shouldn’t be too difficult to develop and test.
- If you read it, what did you think of Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women? — I really enjoyed the article. We had to read the same article in Contemporary Issues in CS when the class focused on biases in CS. I find that unconscious bias in the workplace and even at UT Austin is dangerous and needs to be addressed. The main problem is walking a fine line between doing too little and too much to curb the issue if people share the unconscious biases they have. Too little and that kind of behavior can be normalized, accepted, and have the opposite effect. Too much punishment of people attempting to address their unconscious biases, and you’ll cut people out of the argument for fear of their own repercussions.
- What was your experience of arrays, equal(), and iterators? (this question will vary, week to week) — I found the discussion on arrays, equal(), and iterators to be easy enough to follow. I had taken good notes from the lecture and feel confident that I can use these components well in my own development.
- What made you happy this week? — I saw Tenet in theaters. In the movies! It was a weird experience sitting in such an empty theater, but a reminder of what pre-Covid life was. The movie itself was incredible, a thrilling, well-written, and thought provoking film. I would highly recommend seeing it!
- What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? — My tip of the week is to make sure you are using the correct git clone commands when cloning repositories! I had been cloning with https and wondering why the ssh keys I had set up were not working. After debugging for a little while, I discovered that I was running the git clone command wrong. Clone by SSH on GitLab to avoid that issue!
