CS371g Blog 4

What did you do this past week?

I have been mostly working on the Netflix project, which I started pretty late on. I also had an extremely rocky experience as I was confused about the Boost serialization on top of my Git files corrupting in the middle of the project. I had to clone to another local repo, while also filling in the gaps of some of the lost work. It has been a rather stressful week.

What’s in your way?

I am a little more hopeful about the next project. I definitely want to start sooner and manage by time better. I am also getting ready for the test, which I spent some of the week going over class notes and lectures.

What will you do next week?

I hope to take that test and pass it with reasonable expectations. I will try to balance studying with the next project, while not completely tiring myself out.

What was your experience of RMSE, lambdas, function objects, Boost serialization, and iterators?

Root mean square error is an incredible tool in calculating error. It is a rather straightforward calculation; summing the differences, squaring them, finding that average, and take the square root to hopefully give a reasonable RMSE of 1 or below. RMSE was probably one of the easiest aspects of the project, and the many different ways to calculate RMSE in C++ helped tremendously.

Lambdas are interesting little one-liners of code. They can be as simple as multiplying two numbers or finding the square of a number, which I thought was their only use: simple operations. However, seeing how you can capture by reference, append multiple operations, and introduce them as parameters for functions, the little one-liner became a whole lot more complex.

How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?

I had a pretty stressful week with the Netflix project alongside my SWE’s website project. There has been a lot going on so fast and suddenly, that I find comfort when I spend time with my cat and girlfriend. She has been keeping me sane and comfortable in times of stress, work, and even this ongoing surge of COVID-19.

What made you happy this week?

Definitely turning in my project and having the entire weekend to myself and my loved ones.

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

I found this productivity tool by Microsoft called PowerToys which lets you search for apps and programs on your machine with the press of a button. It feels fast and intuitive, and also comes with additional features such as a keyboard remapper, window layout, and image resizer.