CS371p Spring 2021: Kushal Pachchigar #2

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I started off the semester with some great classes in my final semester! I started working on a project for autonomous driving which is also in C++. It seems simple enough for now, but it’s a semester-long project and builds up to something amazing so I’m excited to see how it goes.

What’s in your way?

I’m a slow reader. So the readings for the class AI is taking up quite some time from my day. Although it is time-consuming, it still is an interesting read. Another part that takes up quite some time is the project from Autonomous driving as it has weekly checkpoints and working in a group so early on in the semester is proving to be challenging as people are still settling in the right “mindset” to start the semester!

What will you do next week?

AI project’s deadline is towards the end of next week, so I’m pretty much going to spend my time doing both AI and autonomous driving projects. As far as OPP goes, I’ll be setting up the tools and try to get docker up and working on my windows machine. I’m looking forward to learning more C++ and details on the project before I start working on the collatz project.

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

Makefiles are pretty useful. The one that we read from Dr. Downing was very detailed and thorough. I think using echo to actually log what is going to be run before actually executing the command would be pretty useful in case of debugging log usage. Using docker image in the makefile for GitLab CI virtual machine was very smart and interesting I think.

What was your experience of Docker?

I have taken SWE with Dr. Downing before where I encountered Docker for the first time. I think it is a very useful tool, but my experience during SWE was not very pleasant. The main issue was that Docker couldn’t see my files on the physical box after hours of googling and office hour help. I decided to use one of the cs lab machines instead for all the required toolchains. I will try to setup docker again this semester with better hope.

What was your experience of assertions?

I have been using assertions for my previous cs classes.

What was your experience of unit tests?

I have been using unit tests for my previous cs classes. It really helps to test our code with unit tests to make sure the code is behaving as expected. Of course, the acceptance test is better to make sure of that but unit tests can be better early on in debugging.

What made you happy this week?

I spent some quality time with my friends and helped some of them to move-in into their new apartment. Seeing them after so long was one of the things that made me happy this week.

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

Pick-of-the-week: I was on top of my academic things this past week and hope to keep up the good work.

Tip-of-the-week: If you haven’t yet, try to see if the autonomous driving class seems interesting enough for you to take in the future!