1. What did you do this past week? This past week has been a shitshow. I’ve done what I preached not to do and have fallen behind. On top of that, I had to fly out of town unexpectedly Friday, for reasons which have further added to my stress level. The Cortisol is flowing freely throughout my being. I did not make as much progress on Darwin as I hoped. The design of that project is proving to be not intuitive at all. In addition, I did not actively seek a partner, so all the work is resting heavily on my shoulders.

2. What’s in your way? I have no idea how to proceed on my design for Darwin. I want to overload the assignment operator for Creature to make things simplistic, but failing miserably. I thought I knew something about C++, but I now feel like I know nothing. It’s incredibly frustrating and disheartening. I am also blocked on my iOS project where communcation and commitment is becoming a problem amongst myself and my teammates.

3. What will you do next week? The Beta version has to be delivered and Darwin has to be turned in. Right now I’m skeptical these are going to get done. However, it’s not the first time I’ve felt that way…

Thoughts on the course, so far… Throwing this Darwin project at us without really learning much about OOP to this point feels like trial by fire. I don’t feel like I’ve learned enough this semester to be successful. In addition, we still have not talked enough about std::vector to really be able to use it extensively. I should be able to just use the documentation, but I’m underneath other classes and short on time.

Tip of the Week: On getters and setters – the idea behind avoiding these makes a lot of sense in terms of writing maintainable code. In production, it’s imperitive to write code that can be maintained over the lifecycle of the product. Most likely, this will be done by someone else, so your code has to malleable in a way that’s easy to change and will not break stuff. To accomplish this, write an interface that does not expose the underlying implementation, which essentially just adds a layer of abstraction.