CS 371p Fall 2026: Dhruva Kumar

Which concept from this week surprised you, challenged you, or finally “clicked”?

I thought the concepts of constructors as implicit cast handlers and the operator method defined as a class were super interesting as a two-way street. One takes you from the class you have into one you want, and one takes another class and makes it into the class you want. I also thought it was ingenious of the language designers to add the explict keyword so that those one-parameter constructors could not be mistaken for a cast by the compiler.

How did the collaborative quizzes help you understand the material - or show you what you still need to work on?

The collaborative quizzes showed that I understood excpetions fairly well (given that they are common to many languages), but showed that I still need to work on understanding the voter algorithm for the project. More on that below.

Did the programming challenge change how you think about solving problems under pressure?

The collatz programming problem was quite nice. It taught me a new technique with array suffixes and iterating backwards (using the memoized simulation) versus just directly simulating the scenario from the start. I am always happy when a problem both helps me build familiarity with C++ and data structures.

What perspective did the assigned paper give you on real-world software engineering?

The assigned paper showed me that pair programming isn’t just something done in OS willy-nilly. It is a scientifically proven method of programming that in the 90s and 2000s had great success under extreme programming. Even in my past internship this summer, while I appreciated heads down time to think about the problem I was working on, there were also times that calling my mentor or another member of the team and explaining my code out loud (or even to an AI) helped me find the gap in my logical framework I was looking for.

Was there a moment of discovery, frustration, or teamwork this week that stands out?

One frustrating thing for me was doing poorly on Friday’s quiz. The concept was not that hard, but I did not review the notes well enough for the voter problem. Therefore, I got the tie scenario wrong. It will serve as a warning to me that I need to start prepping more in depth for the daily quizzes - it will not only help me learn the material but also ease the burden towards the exam.

Tip of the Week

My tip of the week is to take advantage of the EDU power user Codex workspace the university is providing for us. For simple tasks, I think utilizing the effectively unlimited “Chat Mode” on ChatGPT is still very powerful, but when I want agentic usage, the power user workspace provides at least as much usage as a $20 subscription within the 5-hour limit.