CS371p Spring 2021 Week 2: Nathan Hoang

Nathan Hoang
3 min readFeb 1, 2021
  1. What did you do this past week?
    This past week I added concurrency, another CS upper division class, to my schedule. Since I joined the class late, I had a lot of catching up to do so I spent most of my time watching lectures from the previous week and working on a project that’s due this upcoming Tuesday. I attended lectures for my other classes as well.
    Outside of schoolwork, I’ve been playing some Valorant with my friends and cousins lately. I also binged Attack on Titan starting from season 2 all the way to the current season.
  2. What’s in your way?
    My concurrency project and watching Attack on Titan has been taking almost all of my time, so I’m a little behind on the readings and small assignments from my other classes. I’ll be working on those soon.
  3. What will you do next week?
    Aside from catching up on readings and assignments, hopefully starting on the Collatz project and playing more Valorant :).
  4. If you read it, what did you think of the makefile?
    Although I’m not a huge fan of Perusall, reading some of the comments left by other students helped me understand some of the trickier parts of the Makefile. I enjoyed reading the Makefile and this should help Collatz be a bit easier to start.
  5. What was your experience of Docker? (this question will vary, week to week)
    I have a little experience with Docker, but Downing’s explanations definitely helped make everything understandable. I didn’t know that you could mount your own file system to a container, and I think that’s really cool. I don’t plan to install Docker though because it seems like a bit of a pain, and I already have VSCode set up to ssh into the lab machines.
  6. What was your experience of assertions? (this question will vary, week to week)
    I like assertions, I think they a great way to catch bugs. When I’m building out a program I often use assertions to preemptively find bugs. For testing purposes, unit tests are obviously better though.
  7. What was your experience of unit tests? (this question will vary, week to week)
    I think Google’s testing harness is awesome. It does everything that unit tests are supposed to do.
  8. What made you happy this week?
    My sister currently lives on campus, while I live at home. This past week I delivered a table to her and got to spend some time talking to her and it was definitely one of the highlights of this week.
  9. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
    My tip-of-the-week is that VS Code has a remote ssh tool that lets you ssh into a computer (such as the CS lab machines) and it’s useful for developing on a non-linux machine. That’s how I’m doing my labs for other CS classes and I plan to use it for OOP as well.

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Nathan Hoang

I’m a junior studying computer science at UT Austin. Follow me for updates on my software engineering class.