So this week has definitely been interesting to say the least. I took both of Downing’s tests on Monday, tried to start a project group by Tues, became forced against my will to skip class on Wednesday and hang out with a friend who, by now, just finished moving to Dallas, had my group fall apart by Thursday, joined another group by Friday, spent all of Saturday (4th of July) coding, and finally celebrated 4th of July weekend a day late on Sunday.

The Test(s)

Being the very in-depth professor that Downing is, many people seem to have some trouble in his class. More so, sometimes, on his tests. However, already knowing both python and c++ and going to class every day I felt pretty confident in myself. So much so, that I didn’t actually study until the day of, which mainly consisted of writing function signatures on my cheat sheet. Did I mention that I aced both of them? 220/220 for Software Engineering and 210/220 for Generic Programming. Yeah, that felt good. Now to keep it going.

The Project: Phase 1

So I ended up making a friend in Software Engineering. However, we needed a team of 5 for the project, so I went on Piazza to find some others to make a team. After taking the tests I found another person so far, so that wasn’t bad. However, the day after my friend had apparently decided to drop the course. He got 20% off his first project, he didn’t think he did well on the test, and that day we received a notification for our project 2 saying we needed to pass the acceptance test that we submit. Coupled with the fact that he was only taking the class to get ahead in his schedule I guess that was enough for him. For whatever reason after news of him dropping my other team mate decided to join another group. This unfortunately left me alone at a time when most of the groups have already been formed. Going back to Piazza I try emailing every person who still has an open request for groups, and after many failed attempts, I finally find a group needing 2 more people. Unfortunately it seems like I may have been one of the last people looking for a group, because we still haven’t got a 5th person.

As far as the actual project, we’re going with a sort of soccer database for ease. Not going to class on Wednesday turned out to have more consequences than I originally thought, mostly due to the fact that there was no class on Friday. Now I’m left in the dark on many of the project aspects for both of my classes, all of which are due Tuesday. Fun. Knowing this was going to be a hard weekend I start work almost immediately. I set up the team’s slack account rackspace server while we wait to get together and plan out our UML diagrams and whatnot. Funny story, I initially set up a general rackspace account rather than developer account, so when setting up the first server I was charged $159. Luckily there was an employee somwhere working on 4th of July so I was able to open a support ticket and have my account switched almost immediately. Out of one frying pan and into another.

Tip of the week

GitHub has their own command line tool! It’s called hub and it’s basically just a wrapper around git. Unfortunately if you’re on linux this can be a bit anoying to install because the only package manager that it’s in is the one for mac. Because I want to make this easy for you these are the commands to download the lastest version (2.2.1) and install it on a linux NOT amd processor:

$ wget https://github.com/github/hub/releases/download/v2.2.1/hub-linux-386-2.2.1.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf hub-linux-386-2.2.1.tar.gz
$ cd hub-linux-386-2.2.1.tar.gz
$ cp hub /usr/local/bin
$ hub --version

Lastly don’t forget to alias it as git by adding ‘alias git=hub’ to your .bashrc!

What does this add? Click and find out!