CS371p Spring 2021: Keegan Franklin

What did you do this past week?

This week was thankfully a pretty relaxing one. After turning in Darwin, I didn’t have any more pressing deadlines, so I spent my evenings mainly watching HBO max.

What’s in your way?

I may have relaxed too much last week because now I have a ton of work all due on Tuesday. So getting through that mountain of busywork will consume the first half of my week.

What will you do next week?

After getting through the first half of the week, I will begin preparing for a couple of quizzes I have coming up on Thursday. I will also carve out some time to take a look at our last OOP project, life. I may even get the repo set up so I can start getting some preliminary code written up.

If you read it, what did you think of the More getters and setters?

I don’t think I fully grasped the usefulness of a builder class. I understand that it prevents changes in a class from cascading to its clients, thus improving its maintainability, but it seems like the builders are just more elaborate getters/setters. And maybe they are, but if changing a class requires changing the builder, I’m not completely sure what their purpose is? Nevertheless, there was still some information in the article that was interesting and beneficial.

What was your experience of sequence containers, container adapters, and associative containers?

I enjoyed this week’s lectures much more than all of the ones where we talked about vector and its constructors. One interesting thing I took away from lecture is that not all O(1) are equal. It makes sense that adding to a list would be more expensive than adding to an array, but it’s something that I never thought about. It does make me wonder why you would ever use a list at all though. I was under the assumption that the ability to quickly append to the beginning and end of lists was their most attractive quality, but it seems like deques are ultimately faster in this regard.

What made you happy this week?

I got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday. Even though I felt terrible the next day, it’ll all be worth it when this pandemic is finally over.

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

Starting getting your schedule for next semester ready! Also, make sure to have backups if the classes you want get filled.