Week 4: 2/8 - 2/12

What did I do this week?

For this week, I focused on understanding Australian Voting. This involved reading the question, asking questions about behavior, and finally going through some examples. My partner, Rachel, and I began working as soon as we understood the question. We started with designing a nice OOP-oriented structure. This allowed for us to modulize how we were going to approach the problem. This was suggested by Downing in class. It was nice to put his words from class to practice.

As for the class, the material taught was good as usual. Just like previous weeks, we approached these new materials very systematically. We took apart of the material and understood the parts first before understanding how each part related with each other. I really enjoy this method because it allows me to fully understand the code instead of just knowing in a general sense how a certain piece of code works.

One more thing to note, I really liked that a current software engineer came and talked to us about his experience in industry was. He outlined current SWE practices, and I really found that useful. Though I already knew most of the knowledge he told us, there was still some material I had no idea about. Overall, the presentation was really well prepared and very informative.

What’s in my way?

This week, I had my first successes on the daily quizzes. This week, I was able to get 7/7 for all the quizzes! I think the main reason was because I had started to do the readings. In addition to this, the quizzes were starting to quiz on material that we actually covered in class.

The other thing in my way is Project 2. The problem here is that my partner and I already have a pretty optimized solution, but because we need to have some sort of naive/unoptimized solution, we’re trudging along writing this naive solution. Once we get it done, we are ready to apply our optimizations.

What will I do next week?

I will continue doing the readings because they do contain a lot of useful information and examples of the penalties of applying bad programming practices (Mariner and European spaceships!). This will also help me continue getting those 7/7s on the quizzes. In addition, my partner and I will continue working on the Voting project. So far it has been slow, but we should be able to finish it soon given that we are working on it every day.

Recent Discovery

Because Parse is shutting down soon, I found an article that talked about alternatives for it. For instance, Firebase is a really nice alternative. It seems very easy to setup and is helped maintained by Google. I’m expecting to use this on my future personal projects.