Well, this week has been a roller-coaster of good and bad happenings in school. I had two midterms this week, several projects, and an orchestra concert coming up this week (and the week before a performance is always really stressful).
The makeup midterm for OOP was on Monday. I really would have preferred the Friday the day after the original test date, especially since we didn't have class on that day, anyway. I had planned to take the midterm on that day and I was really surprised when it was moved later. I know many people would welcome the chance to spend more time studying, but the problem with moving a midterm closer to another midterm is that you have to spend some of your time studying for each and you don't get as much quality focus time on one thing. Luckily the results were good.
Unfortunately the morning following my late-Monday exam was my graphics midterm. There is only one midterm for that class. Due to a bad test environment (especially the very sick, noisy, and smelly guy that sat next to me for the test and distracted the hell out of me), my grade will be quite bad. I am very worried about that class now and I originally thought it would be totally fine.
Tuesday afternoon and evening, struggle to finish Project 3. It's really hard to know when you're done without good acceptance tests. The unit testing was also rather difficult for this project because you're essentially limited to the common interface with std::allocator. Once you can "cheat" to make everything public and you can test the internals of your implementation, writing tests for it is ridiculous because you have to know how the heap is supposed to look and then check whether it matches. Very very difficult to test, indeed. My normal inclination to be thorough ended up wasting a lot of time because it was hard to come up with things to test.
I've enjoyed the quizzes lately. I did reasonably well on that portion of the test, and we're getting a good look at C++ under the hood. Since I am using C++ in Computer Graphics, I have sometimes wondered if knowing this much about C++ is actually a good thing. I find myself wondering whether the default constructor is good enough and wasting some time trying to get things to work because I implemented a non-default constructor, and lost the default constructor as a result and had to spend time implementing a reasonable copy constructor and copy assignment to make sure everything gets assigned properly. C++ definitely takes a lot of work to really understand what's going on.
Friday was the due date for a big project in computer graphics. I skipped some classes on Thursday and Friday to work on it and finish the whole thing by midnight, and just barely got it working to my satisfaction when it was announced that the deadline was extended 5 days. WHAT? Now I have to spend time catching up on the classes I missed to finish the thing on time, as well as dealing with two new projects (not even counting OOP), and I can't even take advantage of more than a couple hours of the extended deadline. What a waste.
Midterm weeks are terrible. I've got another one coming up, and I don't think I'll even be caught up from last week yet.
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