CS371p Spring 2021: Michael Liu

What did you do this past week?

This past week I mostly just worked on school projects and assignments. Other than that, I went to the gym every weekday in the mornings and played some video games with my friends.

What’s in your way?

I’m currently in my own way. I’m still in the winter break mindset and not really in the back to school mindset yet so I’ve been putting off a lot of work and readings which I really need to get started on soon or else I’ll fall behind.

What will you do next week?

Next week I’m going to try to start running or playing sports for cardio, work on my assignments earlier, and spend more time on my research projects.

If you read it, what did you think of the makefile?

I think that the makefile is a very nice and convenient tool that helps us designate a set of tasks to execute when generating a target. Instead of needing to manually input all of the commands, we can just use the makefile as a shortcut of sorts.

What was your experience of Docker? (this question will vary, week to week)

I’ve used Docker in the past for software engineering projects and I think that its incredibly useful to help maintain the environment in which code runs.

What was your experience of assertions? (this question will vary, week to week)

I’ve used assertions in the past as a way to verify the preconditions for variables when entering methods and functions.

What was your experience of unit tests? (this question will vary, week to week)

Similar to my experience with assertions, I’ve used unit tests in the past as a way to test code that I wrote for software engineering projects and to assure that the behavior of the code is as expected.

What made you happy this week?

This week I was able to go on a hike with my friends and the fresh air and the scenery were both very nice and reminder of things before the pandemic — the hike made me very happy.

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

My tip of the week is that sometimes when working on a piece of code and you just can’t seem to debug it or get it to work correctly, it can be useful to just delete the entire file and start from scratch. Often times a new beginning paired with the insights you gained from the previous run through can help you complete the code faster than just trying to helplessly debug broken code.