Week 8

The week had been full of design making decisions, and most importantly regrets and realizations. I have been working with my partner on the project 7. The project is about implementing a Deque, that would imitate most of the functionality of the standard library's deque (std::deque). We started off with constructors, and tested our deque side by side with the standard deque. Happy with our results, we jumped into coding the methods -- insert, erase, push_front, push_back, etc. Compiling the program without any tests didn't give us any errors/warnings and was a motivation in itself. The realization time started as we started to write the test cases for these methods. Some would result into segfault, and for some the assertions would fail; and some wouldn't even compile. Yet, withstanding all the errors, and resolving those we had our "Deque.h" ready with all of our tests passing. The time was 6:00p on a Sunday (today).

Something struck on us suddenly, the motif behind implementing a deque; shouldn't it have an amortized constant time complexity for push_front() and push_back(). But too late to realize, that we had implemented a vector :(. A few minutes ago I was thinking of all the good stuff I would had for the dinner, and a few minutes later... I could think nothing except the program. But I realized, that some times (or most of the time in my case) when under pressure, brain functions better and productively (though, often it turns into a numb state). And so happened with us, the idea had to click (which hadn't for the whole week) and we had the real deque implemented. Thanks to the partnership again!