CS371p Spring 2021: Varun Nayak

2 min readFeb 15, 2021

What did you do this past week?

I spent a lot of time working on Collatz and an assignment for CS 345 Programming Languages. We are building a language interpreter in this class so that is pretty cool. It took me a while to fix a bug I had on the pipeline but I was able to get it done. This was the busiest week of the term so far in terms of projects. I also completed the HackerRank exercise without any trouble so that was great.

What’s in your way?

I don’t really have anything in my way other than my own procastination. I hope completing projects in this class makes me more efficient in the future. I’m already learning a lot about SWE through this course with pipelines and GitLab

What will you do next week?

I will start on Project 2 with a partner. I’m really looking forward to completing the assignment with a partner. I think it is bittersweet that we have to choose different people for each project but that is a learning curve for me.

If you read it, what did you think of the Pair Programming?

I have read this article before. I think pair programming is a very effective technique and I’m looking forward to using it in this class for the remaining projects. I enjoyed reading other people’s comments and providing my own in Perusall. It does take a while for the AI to accept my comments so it can be a bit frustrating.

What was your experience of operators, pointers, and references? (this question will vary, week to week)

I think the learning curve I weng through in CS 429 helped me grasp pointers, references and operators. Using malloc, free etc and doing bitwise problems helped me understand these concepts.

What made you happy this week?

This week I got to help my brother move into his new apartment in downtown Houston. It was great because he bought me food for helping him move in.

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

I’m using this new extension in VSCode called tabnine. It is very useful with an AI that has autocomplete for many languages. You can download it free in the VSCode store.