CST 338 Week 5

 

Who did you work with on this review, and how did the collaboration actually go?

• If your team was hard to reach, how did you handle it — and what would you do differently next time?
  
  I was unable to get a hold of my team for this learning journal. I was particularly busy and experiencing health issues this past week, as well as most of us were still working on the assignment by Monday and Tuesday. 

Walk through how you approached the Markov assignment from the moment you first read it. What did you do before you wrote your first line of code?

• Looking back, at what point did you feel most lost or stuck — and what got you moving again?
  
  As I usually do, I looked through the Markov prompt document while setting up fields and looking for the methods that would be easiest to set up and would have the fewest dependencies on other methods. This approach leads me to jumping around a lot, but gives me the feeling of building the program step by step and helping to understand how the pieces fit together. I started the methods off with endsWithPunctuation() as it was fairly simple to iterate through the field and compare. I then went to randomWord() and addFromFile() which were also fairly straightforward before attempting addWord(), but this is ended up being the hardest method in the assignment by far and I had to skip it and move to getSentence(). Figuring out how to structure the StringBuilder was tough, but manageable. addWord() was one that I had to keep coming back to throughout the week while contemplating the logic of currentWord and prevWord.

How did your classmates approach the same problem? Pick at least one difference between their strategy and yours and try to explain why you think they went that direction.

• Did hearing their approach change how you understand the problem itself, even a little?
  
  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to work with them this time around. I hope to do the extra credit assignment for reviewing the assignment next week and see how they did it.

If you were starting the Markov assignment over today, what is the one thing you would do differently — and what specifically made you realize that?

• Is that change about how you think through problems, how you organize your work, or something else?
  
  I need to find a way to organize my thoughts on the logic that is asked for in the assignment prompts. Often times I end up getting confused trying to translate it into plain English and figure out what the method is asking for. I spent way too long agonizing over extraneous if statements and connecting the dots behind currentWord being added to the ArrayList of prevWord. That is to say, I think I have a hard time visualizing and working with HashMaps.

Ask a classmate to look at your code against the Google Java Style Guide Links to an external site.. What did they flag, and do you agree with their reading of the style guide?

• There are tools that can apply some of these rules automatically,  see this guide for IntelliJ Links to an external site.. After seeing the peer feedback, does automating style feel like a shortcut or a useful habit? Why?
  
  Comparing my style to the previous work of my teammates, I think sometimes my variable names were unclear or not accurately representing what they did in given methods. This time, I have tried to use precedent from other code that I have seen that simplifies the variables. I think my variable naming habits come from my days of C++ where I was afraid of using this-> due to not truly grasping OOP, and this caused me to adopt variable names that are slightly redundant or overly wordy. My teammates absolutely have clean, readable, minimalist code that I think works very well with comments and I will be seeking to achieve that in future assignments.