What did I do this past week? It’s been a busy one. Let’s count off:

• Sunday: Ran the Run for the Water 5K and then caught a flight to Seattle, Washington for Microsoft interview onsites.
• Monday: Interviewed all day at Microsoft, and then met up with some friends working there. Took the midnight flight back to Austin.
• Tuesday: Election day! I landed at 7AM, got home at 9AM, and had class at 12:30AM. I stayed up late for election results.
• Wednesday: Spent most of the day working on the new OOP Project, Life. Then an ISSS meeting in the afternoon.
• Thursday: Finished the final stage of the Pascal parser for my Compilers project at a MAD Hack Night.
• Friday: Got infected with some new cold that’s going around the CS department. Not great.

What’s in my way? This new OOP project feels like Darwin, evolved.

What will I do next week? Finishing the OOP project, and drinking lots of tea.

Inheritance is a really whacky subject. Which constructors are called? What methods are called? What if a method has a different signature in a child class but its arguments can be “promoted” up the type hierarchy? There’s so much that can go wrong that I kind of miss Java’s default behavior of “everything virtual by default”.

I do enjoy the detailed look we take at C++ in this class. Much like Systems or OS (as classes), it’s nice to uncover the inner workings of code and examine the underlying behavior. “Is it a copy or a reference?” “Is this wasteful?” “Does it matter?” The more insight we have as programmers, the more questions we can ask about our programs.

Although learning C++ was certainly daunting the first few weeks of class, I’m now wishing my first formal class in programming wasn’t about Java. We’re able to learn C++, the language, in a linear fashion, and that allows the assumptions we make alonge the way to get cleared up predictably.

Tip of the Week: I’m sure many of you have heard of Cracking the Coding Interview, the go-to standard for (student) software developer interview training. How Would You Move Mount Fuji? is a similar book that gives a lot of insight into the “puzzle question” trend. It’s a pretty fun read and comes with a lot of puzzle questions and answers, and I’d recommend it if you liked CTCI.