Week 1: 1/19-1/22

Week in Retrospect

This week was a shortened week. As a result, we hit the ground running on the first day. After discussing the syllabus, we immediately jumped into comparing two well-known Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) languages - Java and C++. Because I have had copious amounts of experience with Java and C++ is new to me, I appreciated the meticulous attention presented to show not only the similarities but also the stark differences between the two languages. Though I was intrigued by the lesson, I had forgot a detail about C++ that made me miss one of the three questions on the quiz on Friday. Moving on from this, we covered the first project - Collatz. This project is actually a pretty simple competitive programming problem, but because our professor is also a strong advocate of developing good Software Engineering (SWE) habits, this relatively simple problem must be combined with various SWE practices. Though this may have inital start up time to setup the software, I think I will appreciate this in the long run.

Identifying and Tackling Issues

One issue I encountered was that though I was paying attention to what the professor was lecturing about on Wednesday, I wasn’t able to fully absorb everything that he said. To address this, I will first review the Google Doc that the professor linked on this homepage. In addition, I will also take notes on the material not covered in the Google Doc. As for the project, I need to begin understanding what each requirement entails and how the software we’re required to install will relate to it.

Future Work this week

For the next week, I plan on quickly grasping the first project concretely and begin work. I already understand the problem and do have some ideas as to solving the problem, but the main thing is to get started early!

Recent Discovery

Because Jekyll is a simple static webpage solution, I was interested about other ways to show a dynamic webpage. I encountered a well known infrastructure called Ruby on Rails, and the tutorial so far has been great!