What did you do this past week?

During this past week I started working on our new project, Darwin. I met up with my new partner and wrote some code to cover reading in input and printing out the first round of Darwin. We also created four classes that will take care of the different elements contained in the Darwin simulation. Finally we had three speakers from Atlassian come visit us and give a talk.

What's in your way?

This week the biggest thing in my way is to balance both studying for exams with meeting up with my partner to finish working on Darwin. The biggest challenge I have left is adding in code to dictate the behavior of each of the actions, and adding code in to control the logic of the simulation.

What will you do next week?

Next week I'm going to stay on a roll and get started on the last project as early as I can. I'm also going to start brushing up on the quizzes and papers we were assigned so that I can get ready for the upcoming exam.

What's my experience of the class?

I had a really positive week in OOP. I really enjoyed the talk given to us by Atlassian. I thought that they gave an extremely entertaining talk while also going into very practical concepts that I can apply to my professional life. They spoke about a spike they experienced where a significant amount of their users were experiencing delays using HipChat. They ended up fixing it in an interesting way. Instead of modifying any algorithm, they reduced the amount of data being transferred to just the necessary amount.

What's my pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

This week my pick-of-the-week is this article on how multiplayer games sync their states between players. I'm fairly sure most programmers have lots of experience with online multiplayer games, and while we have a basic understanding of how the back end works, I found the detail here enlightening.