CS373 Spring 2021 Blog #4: Regina Chen
Week of 9 Feb — 14 Feb
What did you do this past week?
This past week, I finished up Collatz and studied for a chemistry exam that I had on Thursday. For the project, I implemented a metacache and a lazy cache! I spent a lot of time struggling to pass the last hackerrank test with just those two caches though, so I tried other different implementations to try to make my code run faster, such as creating multiple metacaches. However, I decided to go back to my original two caches and found that my problem was simply putting my return statement outside an if statement, and not inside. It’s a bit frustrating to know how much time I spent just due to one line of code, but I am glad that I was able to find it and get everything running.
What’s in your way?
As of right now, we’re just waiting on our CATME group assignments so nothing is really in my way yet. I am pretty excited yet nervous to see who my groupmates are, since we cannot choose our groupmates. I feel like it’d be a great way to meet new classmates (especially since everything is virtual), and I hope that we all will work and get along well together!
What will you do next week?
I will begin to think up of topics for the second project, and start taking a look at Restful API’s! I feel like when we get our group assignments, we might spend some time just organizing and setting everything up as well.
If you read it, what did you think of the Pair Programming?
I thought the article explained the benefits, and how to pair program very well. A lot of what I read in the article was familiar to me since we practiced pair programming during OS. From my own experience, I do agree with the article in that with paired programming, I felt more confident and enjoyed the process of programming more.
What was your experience of types? (this question will vary, week to week)
I’ve taken an intro to Python class so I was familiar with most of the types except for forzensets. However, I found the lecture to me very informative on differentiating all the different types and which ones are mutable/immutable, hashable, and the time complexities of using each one.
What made you happy this week?
I am glad to finish Collatz! I feel like the first projects are always a bit difficult learning to use new tools and getting familiar with the workflow, so I’m glad to have figured that out. It was also Lunar New Years, so that made me happy!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Knowing the time complexities of data structures is very useful, especially for interviews! I back in CS314, I remember finding this Big-O cheat sheet to be well organized and very helpful! Since we’re talking about Python types in lecture this week, I found one for some of the types that we’ve discussed here.