I went to a lot of office hours for my classes and got some logistical stuff sorted out. This past week felt really hectic but fun and I think I improved a lot with some of the most important issues I've been facing this semester. But when I look back on my calendar, it seems like I spent a lot of time hanging out with friends in the afternoon and studying in the morning (which is what I've been doing so far, so I don't know what's changed).
I'm just a little worried about finishing up the code and then running into a big issue that I don't know how to fix, so I've been procrastinating on finishing up the project (by working on other homework instead). Aside from that, this week's material has been pretty intense in my opinion, so I've been spending a lot of time reviewing the concepts before/after class each day.
I need to wrap up the Darwin project! This week is going to be a busy one -- there's a lot of homework assignments due and meetings scheduled. For context, I'm part of the Association for Women in Math at UT (AWM) and it's a big, big part of my life (the officer team is basically my closest friend group). So I pour a lot of my energy into the club. Search up "UT AWM" to find our website if you're curious!
I thought it was pretty interesting, especially since I've thought that getter/setters were synonymous with OOP. Probably because my first real exposure to programming was in CS 312/314 in Java. In this sense, I appreciate how the OOP class at UT is taught in C++. It also gives us good practice with using pointers and references.
Explicit is useful for having a very strict constructor which won't use implicit construction. It also makes it easier to check for equality of objects. However, if you have an implicit constructor and want to check for equality, you can use a friend function. Friend functions can use private data but allow for symmetry when checking for equality. As for std::vector, I'm learning a lot about its method signatures. I'm a little worried about using the stack next week (since Dr. Downing hinted at that in class) since I feel more familiar with the heap, so I'll have to brush up on that.
Monday was Norooz (the beginning of the Persian/Iranian year and also the Spring Equinox)! It made me really happy to see how many of my friends remembered Norooz -- it's a very, very special holiday to me. I want to have an even bigger celebration for Norooz next year. I really hope it falls on Spring Break next year like it used to.
Want to store an API key in a public repo (but not expose your secrets for everyone on the internet to see)? Look into using Docker secrets!