What did I do this past week?

It was a relatively light week for me so I got to spend more time for my clubs and doing some extra competitive programming problems for the class. Also this Friday I attended the semesters second competitive programming contest by ACM. This was an individual contest, the first individual contest I attended, and the problems were written by underclassmen instead of the usual people like Arnav and Ethan. I thought the problems were a bit dull. I did ok but still below my expectations. I’m especially mad that I couldn’t answer a simple physics based problem.

What’s in my way?

OOP test and the second CV assignment is looking pretty scary right now.

What will I do next week?

Hopefully complete my CV assignment this weekend so I can spend more time going over OOP C++ problems. I want to make sure I understand everything clearly. I’m not too worried about the test though since I usually did well in the hackerrank portions of the SWE tests last semester. I’m a lot more worried about CV assignment since there is a lot I don’t fully understand.

What’s my experience of the class?

I’m glad we started writing our own iterator classes because I was getting curious on how to do those. Also it was enlightening learning about the difference between default constructors and copy constructors. Overriding certain operators in C++ took me by surprise as well seeing how easy it is to do them. Lastly the difference between struct and class was the one thing that stuck with me the most because I never knew structs could actually be used like that and difference between class and struct was so subtle.

Pick of the week

It is pretty popular in media right now but I want to bring attention to Amazon’s partially automated grocery store Amazon Go. In this grocery store there are no cashiers and people simply enter the store using their cellphones and put the items in their backpacks and leave. The system automatically detects which items you bought and charges the amount to your credit card. It works surprisingly well and the only location is in Seattle. There are some nice reviews of the location on Youtube which I strongly recommend people to checkout since it is such a unique system. Here is one review I personally enjoyed a lot We Stole Tampons from the Cashier-less Amazon Go Store. Don’t let the title fool you, it is a pretty decent review that touches on ethical and technical problems of the system as well.