CS371p Spring 2021: Hogan Tran
What did you do this past week?
For the past week, I’ve been catching up my classes that I’ve missed due to the snow storm. Some projects and homework were thankfully pushed back so I spent most of my time doing them. Furthermore, I’m also just catching up on the amazing weather in Austin after a week of just freezing cold.
What’s in your way?
For now, I’m getting ready for a few of my exams that are coming up. I’m also currently working through the Voting Project, which should be coming up to a wrap sometime in the week.
What will you do next week?
For next week, I plan to finish the Voting Project. I also plan to study for a few of my upcoming exams throughout the week.
If you read it, what did you think of the Single Responsibility Principle?
The SRP is definitely a useful principle for programmers. It helps write much more cleaner code and classes while also building up our code hygiene fundamentals. SRP is usually first encountered when writing functions, as we don’t want them to take on too many tasks, so it makes sense to also see it applied to classes. Convoluted functions and tasks often leads to not only the users and customers lost in the code but also the programmer.
What was your experience of Voting and consts? (this question will vary, week to week)
How did you fare in the storm?
I think my apartment complex definitely got the short end of the stick for the storm. We lost power on 3 A.M Monday, with water soon to follow. At first, we thought it wasn’t going to be so bad because of the promised “rolling blackouts”, but reality hit and we didn’t fully receive power until Thursday night. Unfortunately for us, our apartments aren’t exactly walking distance of any stores, so we spent roughly 4 days freezing in our apartment, with little food and no water. There was a night where we just ate chips with salsa and Oreos for dinner. That made it hard to sleep without constantly waking up hungry, on top of being cold. And then there was a night where power was briefly restored and we made some instant ramen with bottled water, because it was the fastest and most filling thing we had at the time. It was probably the best ramen I’ve ever had, after nights of chips and cookies. Besides everything, I think just the inability to do anything made the outage a lot worse. My laptop was dead so I couldn’t even work on offline programming projects or papers. My Nintendo Switch was also unfortunately low on battery. My phone was fine but we didn’t have internet and spotty mobile data. However, we did have board games, which I felt greatly passed our time and made our roommates feel a little closer. And thankfully, we did have neighbors who lent us food and blankets, which made the entire experience a little less depressing.
What made you happy this week?
I’m just really glad we have our power and water fully back. I never expected Texas to ever drop so low, so I hope that when next year comes around, we are better prepared for winter.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week is don’t eat chips as a meal. It really doesn’t do anything. It’s just empty calories that will make just keep making you feel hungry.
