Getting close to the end, dear readers, and the class is ramping up fast! After being spoiled by the straightforwardness of our previous project on allocators, I admit to being utterly confused on this next project. It’s an exercise of getting objects in C++ to “talk” to each other (i.e. share data or give instructions) without using getters and setters. My partner and I attempted to do this using interfaces (or abstract classes in C++), but this become overly complicated and messy very quickly. Now we have a few ideas on how to give instructions via functions, but the actual access of internal data remains a mystery. Hopefully we’ll get some insight this week in class.

On a brighter note, we had a guest speaker come in this week from Mutual Mobile. I had heard him and his team speak before in my Mobile Computing course, but I still found his particular line of work completely fascinating. The idea of working with such a wide range of customers and projects seems like such an enlightening and invigorating experience. I am also once again impressed (and a little surprised) at the attention to good user interface design and testing. I knew it was important to me and what I want to do for a career, but it is not heavily stressed in any of the UT courses (apart from those that specialize in it), so it is a pleasant surprise to see it so heavily used in industry.

Tip of the Week: A bit of “light” reading for those interested a more academic look at systemd: http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0