Hey I didn't know Markdown had Support for Footnotes
We are now well into the second month of 2021, and I can say that it's been a busy time so far. I debated not writing a newsletter this week but I thought it would be a shame to break my streak (again, I'm shooting for consistency rather than quality with these posts). Here's a short blurb about what's happened and what's coming up.
Last week I wrote about the horrors for CPSC 508, and the mountain(s) of reading that comes with the course. I feel like it has calmed down somewhat, probably due to me getting used to the reading I would have to mentally prepare myself for, and also calibrating for the amount of effort I'd have to put in in order to get through the course (quite a bit). This weekend was filled with my project partner and I madly writing our project proposal for the course, the title of which you can see below:
Inspiration was certainly borrowed from the Untitled Compiler Pass Visualization that a couple of my friends created last term in InfoVis, if any of you are reading this - thanks! Anyway, the plan is to create a debugger that uses the idea of provenance to enable developers to clone a debugging session which they can then share with their collaborators.
I'm not too sure about the feasibility of this idea, but it sure seems like an interesting thing to explore; I'm sure I'll complain about it in a future newsletter, as is tradition.
I've also been writing a bit of Python recently for the directed studies course I'm taking with my advisor 1. As always, the lack of static typing pains me, but I found the idea of decorators to be pretty remarkable. It definitely reminds me of Aspect-oriented programming, where you can effectively execute code alongside the original source code given that it fulfills a set of predicates. I don't completely agree with some assessments that it is as powerful or expressive as pure AOP, since it requires one to explicitly annotate join points 2 in the code, which is not required in AspectJ.
This week I'll be finishing up a SAT-solver assignment for 539. My partner and I have suffered through many pair-programming sessions to arrive at an implementation that we think is good enough for submission. I also have a couple interviews coming up for a summer internship. I won't go into detail about them here but I'll probably mention then later down the line.
Until next time!