What are you most proud of doing last week?
I attended a lot of recruiting events! I had the chance to attend both the Fall Engineering Expo as well as the CNS Career Fair. Talked to a lot of companies, so that’s exciting.
What ability or skill did you use to make that moment the most proud of?
Networking. When I first started computer science, I didn’t realize the importance of talking and building relationships with people and recruiters. I naively assumed I’d be staring at code all day and wouldn’t need to utter a word (an introvert paradise), but CS is all about networking. It took me a while to build up the confidence to hold interesting conversations and also sell myself as a candidate — but now, it’s become second nature, so I’m happy!
What impact did what you do have on other people?
Hopefully I came off as an interesting and engaged individual to the people that a talked to! Recruiting is all about playing the long game — I might not get anything out of it now, but hopefully some time in the future someone thinks about me and my abilities when a new role opens.
What did you think of Paper 3 — Continuous Integration.
It was a fun read! I only know about continuous integration through Git, but it was interesting to pick apart each relevant part (push, pull, merge, issues, testing, build) and detail why it’s an important part of maintaining code for both large and small projects. I always used Git because that’s what I was taught, but I never really thought about all its uses beyond just storing all my code. It’s really important to have controls like this this for projects where multiple people are working together. For me, thorough commit comments are so important, because even though I can see the lines changes, some times the functionality of the added/removed pieces of code is not so obvious.
What did you think of assertions, unit tests, coverage, `is_prime()` and argument passing? (This question will vary, week to week.)
Assertions are so important! The first time I needed to use asserts was when I took Operating Systems (this is also the first time I was working with C/C++). At the time, I was pretty frustrated that failed asserts just stopped the program. Now, I see that using asserts must be purposeful and there’s certain ways of using them that would give more information about where the code is breaking. As for argument passing, it was nice to review things like pass by address and pass by reference. I never fully understood this topic before, but with the example function given in class, I believe I fully understand the pros/cons of different kinds of argument passing.
What made you happy this week?
Started building a game!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?*
If anyone if thinking about what game engines to use for 2D games, consider Godot! It doesn’t have such a steep learning curve, and it’s much easier to use than Unity or Unreal Engine if you’re not interested in building super heavy graphics for your game.
