The end is near, dear readers. We’ve begun our final project! We’ve been assigned Conway’s Game of Life with the same caveat as Project 4: no getters and setters. I must admit that I am extremely grateful to have the opportunity to gain more experience with this particular object-oriented challenge. Though I learned quite a bit from Project 4, I felt there was still a great deal more for me to grasp. I would go so far as to say Downing may have planned it this way – to give those students who were more behind on the last project more time to learn the important points. Thanks Downing!

Another piece of excitement: we had our last guest speaker this week. A pair from Atlassian squeezed a two-hour lecture into 50 minutes (props to them). In general I was impressed with the sheer volume of internal tools they support. They seemed truly dedicated to finding common problems and solving them for all coders to use. They also seemed really excited about the breadth and types of projects that they were currently working on, which is my favorite piece of any talk. That’s when you know it is a good company to be a part of. Finally, it is once again refreshing to hear how important user interface design is in the “real world” industry. I wish that UT had more robust UI/UX programs to help give coders a leg up on such an important piece of their day-to-day job.

Tip of the Week: Want to know how GDB searches for a sourcefile? Check it out here: https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Source-Path.html