CS371P Fall 2021 Week 3: Vishal Tak
Week 3 Progress in OOP.
1. What did you do this past week?
This past week I finished the Collatz project and applied to lots of full-time jobs in software engineering. I finished some coding challenges and practiced for technical interviews using LeetCode. I also attended the career fair and met recruiters from tech companies.
2. What’s in your way?
Currently, there is nothing major in my way. Class assignments have been taking up most of my time keeping me from practicing for technical interviews. Generally, the workload of most CS upper-division classes is pretty high, and taking time out from constant assignments is getting difficult as the semester goes on.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week, I plan on finishing all of my class assignments to make time for practicing for technical interviews. I have about five interviews next and I need to ensure that they all go well by practicing. I also plan on starting early on the next assignment for OOP in order to be ahead of the schedule.
4. If you read it, what did you think of Paper #4: What Happens to Us?
It was a difficult reading this week touching on issues of sexism, harassment, and racism that women face in the workforce. The accounts of verbal harassment and taunts used against the author made me wonder about the various unaccounted cases where these things happen on a daily level. I wonder how many women are sexually assaulted by their male colleagues? How many are refrained from taking action because they will lose their jobs if they speak up? It is shocking that we still live in a society where women are not seen as equal to men when at times they are more qualified.
5. What was your experience of Collatz, exceptions, and strcmp?
I thought the Collatz project was pretty interesting and I enjoyed working with all of the different tools/libraries from the toolchain. It was also interesting learning about the different ways exceptions are used in software development. I was surprised by learning how exceptions can be used to fix bugs that chain down from catches throwing other exceptions that get processed at a different state of the program. I thought the implementation of strcmp was pretty trivial since I had worked on it before in another class.
6. What made you happy this week?
I was happy to get replies back from companies about progressing further in the application process. I’m hoping to perform well on the technical interviews and secure a job by the end of the semester.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is to use this link to practice for technical interviews. It's a list of the most common types of interview questions on LeetCode and helped me revise data structures and algorithms.
