CS 371p Fall 2020: Michael Lee

What did you do this past week?

This past week I finished up the voting assignment for this class and began working on my next projects for my Neural Networks and Computer Network Security classes. The Neural Networks project involves writing a convolutional neural network for image classification and the Computer Network Security project involves implementing the TLS protocol.

What’s in your way?

I’m a bit behind on the material for my other two computer science classes and I’m hoping to catch up this weekend. Other than that it’s the typical issues of juggling multiple deadlines and responsibilities in a timely manner.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I’ll try to get my other projects done and hopefully start studying for my upcoming midterms.

What was your experience of values, addresses, references and consts?

I’m pretty familiar with C++ so most of the content was just review for me. They were definitely confusing topics when I first learned them though so I think professor Downing gave a great overview of how each of them worked for the people who may be more new to the topics.

How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?

I’ve been doing good, a bit stressed out with my deadlines, but nothing that isn’t manageable.

What made you happy this week?

I recently came back home for a bit (I was previously on campus) for my birthday and I’m looking forward to getting to spend some time with family.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick of the week is definitely going to be tcmalloc. For my summer internship, I had to deal with a problem where a C++ job was using massive amounts of memory, ~100gb, and needed to track down what components were eating up the most memory for the purpose of optimization. At first, the only applicable tool I could think of was Valgrind but that would incur too great of a slowdown to be practical. Instead I came across TCMalloc which was very easy to integrate (you only need to add a compile flag) and generates very nice snapshots of heap utilization over time to help you track what’s using up your memory.