Hello! My name is Kevin Wu and I am a rising sophomore at UT. I grew up in Houston, Texas and attended Bellaire High School. At Bellaire, I would say my favorite extracurricular activity would be playing basketball with my friends. I chose to attend UT because their CS program is excellent and their overall tuition, including living cost, is cheaper than out of state schools. I decided to major in CS because the subject keeps me the most intellectually interested compared to the other fields I was considering and I really enjoyed my time in high school learning CS.
I decided to register for CS371g to learn C++, improve my proficiency with git, and gain more coding experience that mirrors the real world. In terms of expectations for the class, I expect to learn and grow a lot as a programmer during the course of this class. I also expect the projects and exercises to be challenging, which will prepare me for potential interviews for summer internships or coding contests.
I am pretty much new to C++, but I do have experience with C and Java, so I don’t think picking up C++ should be too much of an issue. Additionally, although I have worked with Python and HTML before, I wouldn’t say I am incredibly knowledgeable about either.
I thought Friday’s lecture was great: the question-answer format was unique and engaging, and I didn’t really find myself losing too much focus despite the lecture being 2 hours long over Zoom. I don’t mind the cold calling during the lecture, as I wouldn’t say I am shy or unwilling to answer questions in a lecture setting.
I met up with some old friends from Bellaire this week and caught up after more than a year of not seeing each other. It was so much fun to talk and find out how much we have all grown since the pandemic starting, and seeing them again after such a long time really put a smile on my face.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is this article from MIT, which discusses the vulnerabilities and potential improvements for automated programming tools such as VSCode and Eclipse’s suggested code functions. I really enjoyed reading this article, and it proposes an interesting future we may be headed towards, one where our IDEs can understand the code we write on the exact same level as a fellow programmer.
