CS371p Blog#3 Fall 2020, Saumyaa Krishnan

Saumyaa Krishnan
2 min readSep 13, 2020

Hello! Here is my blog update for this past week.

  1. What did you do this week?

This week, I spent time working on the homework and projects I had this week, including Collatz, a homework assignment for my algorithms class, and some history assignments. More specifically, for Collatz, I worked on getting my basic implementation done, getting my GitLab repo set up, and fixing+ creating some tests. Aside from school, I am also a part-time teacher for a local math academy, so I did some work for that!

2. What’s in your way?

Currently, there is nothing in my way! I had a few doubts about the workflow earlier which I cleared, but other than that, I just need to figure out how to optimize my implementation.

3. What will you do next week?

This coming week, I need to get Collatz completed and turned in and make sure I am attending lectures and staying engaged. In addition, I need to stay on top of my other classwork and make sure I’m on task with school!

4. What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions?

Overall, I think Collatz has been a good learning experience, as it is different from a lot of my previous programming projects. Initially, the workflow caught me off guard, as I wanted to implement the solution in my own order, so I found myself skipping a few steps in the workflow and returning to it later. After doing that, I realized that following the workflow was much easier, as it was a better layout to complete the project. The starter code was easy to understand, and it was easy to implement a basic version of Collatz. The paper on MakeFiles was useful for me to understand this makefile, and I am still working on optimizations for my code. Exceptions were a good concept to learn, as I used them a lot but did not understand their benefits that well.

5. What made you happy this week?

This week, I spent some time with my grandparents, and that was a good break for me to relax and spend some good family time!

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

My pick of the week is this online C++ compiler. It helped me compile code much faster, and I did not have to create new files if I wanted to write code that I was not sure I would use (ex: input for tests).

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