CS371g Summer 2021: Kevin Wu Week #4

What did you do this past week?

This past week I completed the Netflix project for this class and spent my free time playing basketball and watching UEFA European Football Championship games.

What’s in your way?

With Netflix out of the way, I would say that now the main thing in my way is just my relative inexperience with C++. However, I would say that the few weeks I have been in this class have already drastically improved my knowledge with the language, so as I enter the second month of this course I think that I will continue to become more comfortable with the language.

What will you do next week?

Next week I hope I have enough time to either play basketball or get some kind of workout in everyday, but if we are assigned another project in this class I will likely spend time on that too.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #4: Twice as Good?

I was a bit conflicted about this paper, as I was really expecting it to talk much more about outreach programs in order to increase the number of marginalized peoples in undergraduate CS programs and eventually in the workforce. Although I do not really agree with the author’s solution for addressing DEI issues in undergraduate CS programs, I still think it was a good paper to read and it definitely made me think a lot about the author’s arguments for a mandatory course regarding cultural competence in computing.

What was your experience of exceptions, consts, algorithms, and iterators?

I have had prior experience with these concepts in Java, but going over them in C++ during lecture was not only a great refresher for non-language specific components of these ideas, but it also helped me familiarize myself with these concepts in the context of C++.

What made you happy this week?

Something that made me happy this week was seeing one of my oldest and closest friends before he left for Europe. Because of COVID and because we went to different colleges, we haven’t been able to see or hang out at all in at least a year, so I was really happy that we were able to meet up at literally the day before he left.

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

My pick of the week is Silicon Valley, a comedy from HBO that follows the entrepreneurs of a fictitious start up called “Pied Piper” from its inception within a hacker hostel to its glory days and eventual downfall. I would recommend this show to anyone, but especially to my fellow CS peers, as it is not often that such a large, well-written, and entertaining show is set in the world of computer science.