What are you most proud of doing last week?
Finally had the chance to work on my game development project! Built a library isometric floor map in Unity. I haven’t really been on the actual graphics/set-up side of game dev before and it’s been an interesting experience being away from the code.
What ability or skill did you use to make that moment the most proud of?
Most of this was stuff I had to watch Youtube videos to figure out, so I guess I used my ability to learn. I went through a lot of tutorials before I finally got the hang of the Unity interface. There’s so many random things you have to consider when doing graphics (lighting, camera, colors, etc.)
What impact did what you do have on other people?
I did this part alone, but I’m working on a team to build this game. I think that everyone will finally be able to visualize the game and see its physical aspects, and hopefully that helps them develop the storyline more.
What did you think of Paper #6. Open-Closed Principle.
It was definitely an interesting read. These are topics that we’ve talked about before but they really haven’t been explained in detail. I actually didn’t realize how much emphasis there was in extending a class or functionality instead updating the existing code. I understand where this is coming from (changes to a class means changes to everything that inherits from it) but I wonder where the line is for this. At what point does extra code cause unnecessary overhead and confusing dependencies?
What did you think of Project #2. Voting.
It was a tough project. Since we were starting with an empty repo, I think a lot of the setup took more time than the actual coding. And with the amount of code we had to do, it was easy to run into errors with the Makefile (especially since the last one was just given to us). For example, my partner and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why we were getting a hang-up when running gtest testcases, but it turns out it was because we were trying to compile run_voting and test_voting at the same time, and both mains were clashing. In the end, what we thought was an implementation issue was actually a logistic error.
What did you think of reverse(), iterator_tags, const methods and friend functions? (This question will vary, week to week.)
We definitely talked about a lot of things this week that I don’t fully understand. The friend function especially — what is its use outside of operators? I’ve genuinely never seen it being used before and I’ve used C++ for a while. It’s interesting to see that C++ still has so many specific functionalities that many are not aware of.
What made you happy this week?
I’m happy that it wasn’t midterms week. Unfortunately, that week is next week. But I’m glad I got some calm before the storm.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Be careful when using Chat-GPT to code. A lot of the code it provides runs well on basic testcases but doesn’t stand against thorough edge-case testing. It’s important to remember this, especially as each GPT model gets even better, it’s easy to forget that Chat-GPT can sound very convincing while saying something so extremely wrong.
