CS373 Spring 2021: Blog 2

CS373 Spring 2021: Blog 2

1. What did you do this past week? I learned about the Collatz Conjecture, solidified my understanding of unit testing in Python, made sure I could download and run Prof. Downing’s Docker image, and started the Collatz project.
2. What’s in your way? I started the Collatz project by first doing the HackerRank. However, even with decorators and memoization, I kept getting runtime errors for the third test case. When I changed my approach to use a dictionary instead of memoization with decorators, that got rid of the runtime error, but I’m still timing out on the third test case. I have some ideas on how to fix this which I’ll attempt the next time I work on the project.
3. What will you do next week? Like I said in the previous question, I have a couple of things I want to try out in my code next week to pass the third test case on HackerRank. I will also write some tests of my own to see what cases my solution would be failing on.
4. If you read it, what did you think of the makefile? I thought it was pretty intuitive and the surrounding comments were very helpful for understanding what each command does. I had to look up some of the flags for the commands, and noted them through annotations on the document.
5. What was your experience of Docker? I downloaded the Docker image for the project in my previous internship but didn’t end up using it that much to do work on. I hope that through this class, I’ll be able to use it more since it seems like a really important tool.
6. What was your experience of assertions? I used assertions a lot in C++ last semester during my OS class, since debugging multithreaded code with GDB was a hassle. This was probably the first time (that I can remember) seeing assertions in Python code.
7. What was your experience of unit tests? This wasn’t too surprising to me since I did unit testing in Java in 314 and unit testing in React.js in my previous internship.
8. What made you happy this week? Being in Austin with my friends and working/hanging out together!
9. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? While looking for more resources on Docker, I found this site that lets you run Docker commands online in an interactive sandbox environment. It also comes along with a tutorial that’s easy to walk through! I found it very useful for reinforcing what I learned from Downing’s lecture.