CS373 Fall 2020: Sydney Owen
Blog 2
What did you do this past week?
I began the Collatz assignment. At first, I tried to complete the assignment on my Linux partition, but I quickly realized that was not going to work as I did not have many of the programs required installed and those that I did have were the wrong version. I installed Docker on my Linux partition as it’s where I prefer to work. After that, I just fixed the unit and acceptance tests, made a few new ones, and implemented the simplest solution to the problem.
What’s in your way?
Time is in my way. All of my classes but this one are reading-based which takes up a lot of time. Add my TA position on top of that and I feel like I’m working constantly. It leads to a lot of fatigue which is difficult for me to combat while I’m working from home.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will implement optimizations to my code for the Collatz assignment. I am hoping to be able to finish the assignment tomorrow, but I will be happy as long as I finish it this week.
What was your experience of assertions, unit tests, and coverage?
I am not a fan of the assertions or unit tests so far. That might be because this assignment seems too simple, so far, to allow for good use of either. There is so little to keep track of that it seems like there should only be a few assertions in the code. I am also struggling to come up with unit tests for the code, but I believe that to also be the result of a simple problem.
I have not had to worry about coverage as of yet. All of my tests still have 100% coverage. I think the concept of coverage is interesting, though. It is not a concept I believe I have touched on yet, but it makes sense as to why one would want to worry about it when testing code. I am interested to see what I will end up doing with it in the future.
How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?
I have been holding up pretty well, so far. I am always tired during the week, but it is often due to my own poor decision making. I am working on being better about managing my time. Since I am living with my parents for the semester, they have been very supportive of me with my classwork.
What made you happy this week?
My parents and I had a (mostly) homemade pizza and movie night the other night. We all put our pizzas together with whatever toppings we wanted and cooked them before sitting down to watch a movie. It was super fun!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is RESTClient. It’s a browser extension that allows you to send HTTP requests (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, etc) to various websites and look at the response they give you. I used this extension for CS378 Modern Web Applications to test my RESTful web application. I don’t know exactly what the assignments for this class will end up looking like, but this browser extension could prove useful.
