October 2011 Archives

Blog 2


Working with a partner on a piece of code has both advantages and disadvantages. It's great when you're stumped, or there's a piece of bug that you don't want to work on, and BAM. Your partner did it. AWESOME. In this respect its great. All that you have to do then is ask your partner to explain it to you. And then you move on. Also when you're stuck, it helps sometimes to collaborate. You can each voice your ideas, and sometimes between the two of you a solution can be created. This is usually quicker and easier than trying to figure out what's going on by yourself. Sometimes problems arise however. If you're working separately and both try to fix the same problem this can lead to conflicting updates, and a waste of time with both of you trying to working on the same thing.
When you and your partner have different ideas on what the problems and the solutions are it sucks. You think that it should look like this, your partner thinks it should be like this, and then you waste time trying to prove to each other that each of you is right. This is not really a bad thing, because when you analyze both of the arguments you can come up with the best parts of each person's ideas and end up with a better solution than either of you originally though of. Of course you could also end up with something worse. This happened to me while working on iteration 1. My partner and I were trying to decide exactly how the print function should work. We both had radically different ideas on what to do. We ended up resolving a solution pretty quickly, so it wasn't a very big deal, but it still was a minor annoyance. As I said I didn't have much trouble with this in iteration 1, but it was there and I think it may pop up again, and I see how it could prove to be a big problem, especially if the function in question is very complicated and large.
There were a few hiccups for me in Iteration 1. The problem I mentioned where I didn't agree with what my partner thought it should be, we had a few problems with conflicts when we each tried to submit a chunk that both of us had been working on. It wasn't all bad however. There were a few spots that I didn't really know what was going on and how to set it up and my partner helped figure it out, and with the amount of code that we had to write for all of the different tokens, having a partner helped a lot to lighten the load. So to sum it all up I think working in a group is worth it. There are a few problems that arise, but they can be worked out or even avoided completely with good communication. The amount of help a partner can provide more than makes up for the potential discord in my mind.

Failblog 1

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First blog. Yay. I hope to learn many things in this class. Uh, never-mind that's waaay too formal. Anyway following the assignment specifications: There aren't a lot of things on the list of Intended learning outcomes that I am really familiar with. I know how to write effective comments (I think) although I don't particularly enjoy it. Writing comments feels like a waste of time, but I do understand the reason behind it and I have found it useful in the past. I just accept it as a necessary (and useful) evil I suppose. I was introduced to the theory of defensive programming, and I understand the concepts. I won't say I'm
particularly good at it, I'm not. Quite frankly my coding skills are trash. But I do understand the idea, and have seen a few sample of what a programmer ought to do. I have never used C++, so I'm hoping to get an idea of how that works in this class. I used C in CSci 2021 and hated it. Java is way better. But I'm hoping C++ will be a little bit nicer. I'll find out in due time. I have no idea how to create a model and implement one when creating a program. The UML is an entirely new concept to me, but if I can figure it
out and use it effectively, I see how it could perhaps speed up, and maybe ease the design and coding process. OK I'm really bored now. I want to learn everything. And I don't know anything, I don't feel like going in depth on one or two topics. In fact I don't think I could if I wanted to. I don't know anything about what we're supposed to learn, so I can't really say anything about them other than the basic "_____ is a really awesome noun. I can't wait to learn more about it!!!!!" (note that's sarcasm). OK I wrote something. Why do I really want to learn any of the things that I'm supposed to learn in this class?
Uh... cuz then I be smarter. Then me does better. Then credit for class I get. I would like to learn to code better as a whole. I need to be able to use different tools to get my code clean and efficient. My code ought to be readable because everything that I write will be absolutely amazing and everyone will want to know how it works so they can copy it and steal my ideas, and then the world will be a better place. Or not. whatever. Oh I also think the regular expression idea is pretty cool. Plus I'm learning about them in CSci 4011 so now I got to learn about regex's twice. I'm so lucky. They are rather useful, as they can feed information about text rather efficiently. Alright I'm done. I didn't really write 1-2 pages so sue me. I don't care anymore.

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November 2011 is the next archive.
