CS371p Fall 2020 Week 12: Darshan Bhatta

What did you do this past week?

This past week I cooled down for a bit then started working on the new Life project. I also started brushing up on some of the topics that we learned about in class that is useful for the project.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is in my way currently.

What will you do next week?

I will be finishing up the project and continue learning more about the things we are learning by practicing some of the implementation done in class.

If you read it, what did you think of The New Methodology?

I thought it was a good essay and the points the author brought up made sense. For example, discussing the tradeoffs of agile vs the traditional “code and fix” vs the other methodologies discussed in the paper. I have often used agile and learning the benefits and disadvantages with alternatives gave me a broader view of the software development lifecycle.

What was your experience of containers, container adapters, and Life? (this question will vary, week to week)

I did not have a lot of experience implementing containers but I knew they existed and what purpose they showed. After going through the common container implementations for data structures like deque, list, and vectors, it made a lot of sense. Similarly, for container adapters, I knew their existence and how they relied on containers that we have used before but did not know their implementation in C++. After going through the implementation in class and reading the notes in the Gitlab, I think I have a good understanding of their implementation and choices behind their underlying containers for the respective data structure. For the Life project, the lecture on Friday gave me a good idea of how to approach the project and the things needed to get it working. I look forward to finishing the project this week.

What made you happy this week?

I was happy this week to get my OS project done on time. We finished the virtual memory project which was the hardest project so far this year.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is Redis, an open-source in-memory store. It is used mostly as a way to cache things in memory such as heavily read database queries in a distributed system. For example, you have 5 servers serving your backend API and you have a heavy query that needs to be cached. Instead of having a cache within each server, you have a centralized cache that those servers can read from. I recommend to check it out for anyone that is interested in designing a high scale application.