cs online - ralva

We covered a whole lot this week! Though I want to focus in specifically on CPU scheduling, which was probably the most mind-boggling to me. We obviously covered the different scheduling policies and what they mean: First in, First Out: Run the jobs in the order they are received. Hopefully how a drive through operates. (Except for when they make you pull over OMG) Shortest Job First: Run the shortest job first, simple enough right? Shortest Time to Completion: The scheduler is comparing the remaining run time to the run time of the current job. Round Robin: Run each job with a given time slice and move on, cycling through them. There's obviously a ton more in depth, and a ton to grep here -- but what was really interesting were all these different strategies. As someone who spent most of his time writing Javascript, FIFO feels familiar to me. Javascript is a single-threaded language -- which means the entire Javascript event loop runs very similar to a FIFO in concept. This is why...

We covered a lot in the first week! I generally have a lot of experience in Linux and the shell, having written many bash and Makefiles in the past while building CI pipelines. So it's nice to see that knowledge will crossover into the class! Similarly I have good experience in the command line since I usually test APIs with cURL and only use Git via the command line. Despite the good foundation, I think one of the big learnings curves from this first week was writing C. I definitely have written C in past CS classes, but it's been a long time and much of the code we've written in CS Online has been Java. So the first coding exercise was definitely a little bit of a struggle. Sure C to Java has familiar control structures (if, else, for, while and switch) and they're both statically typed. But there are a lot of critical differences in the two. Java handles garbage collection (while JVM more specifically) whereas C does not. I imagine as we get deeper into the class we...