CS373 Spring 2021: Brian Wang, Blog #3
3 min readFeb 8, 2021
- What did you do this past week?
I worked on most of the Collatz project this week. It is pretty fun trying to think of ways to make a faster solution for a problem, and the problem on Hackerrank is in similar style to questions found in competitive programming. - What’s in your way?
I want to look over everything before updating my README with the last commit message and submitting to Canvas. In addition, I am still waiting for merge requests to be processed. I did most of the requirements earlier this week so I would have time today to do other homework. - What will you do next week?
Next week I will turn in my Collatz project. Today and tomorrow, I will have to start and finish my math homework, and on Monday I will have to start and finish a problem set for another CS class. - If you read it, what did you think of the Continuous Integration?
It certainly helped that Professor Downing explained the Continuous Integration on Gitlab before reading the paper. I am a little surprised that running the tests after pushing might take at least an hour. If we are to ensure that the tests pass before continuing working, I’m not sure what we are supposed to do in the time after pushing but while the tests are running. - What was your experience of Collatz? (this question will vary, week to week)
I thought it was pretty fun. It was a bit of a Python and a data structure review. The Collatz problem itself is fun to think about, and I wonder when someone might finally prove it. - What was your experience of exceptions? (this question will vary, week to week)
I personally have not used exceptions much. They seemed a bit of a hassle, especially with Java IO, where you have to ensure that the file you are reading from actually exists, and you have to handle such exceptions. The examples that Professor Downing showed in class have shown me the convenience of exceptions in general programming, though. - What made you happy this week?
There was a competitive programming contest hosted by UTPC this past Friday! My teammates and I solved a total of six out of the nine problems. Unfortunately, using Ford-Fulkerson for a bipartite matching with unit weights resulted in a time-limit exceeded on one of the problems, and I learned I was suppose to use another max-flow algorithm (like Dinic’s algorithm) for such problems. - What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week is to have several templates of well-known data structures and algorithms in an easy-to-find place. Though it is important to understand how the code of the template works, it saves a lot of time to be able to use a tested template on a timed problem.
