First Week of Software Design!

 



It may not be alot, but it's a start! I plan to document my progress and take a step back what when right and what went wrong. 




The Coding Bat challenges this week humbled me. I really thought that I knew the basics! But being out of practice for over year, I felt the skill atrophy. For some of the easier problems, I just kind of threw code at it and fixed whatever red box scenarios that weren’t passing on the fly. 

For the more difficult ones, I had a hard time isolating what when wrong with my code. This was especially true for the String 2 section of the practice problems. I found myself writing and re-writing my code. I personally felt like I went overboard with the sheer number of variables it took me to solve some of them. I even had to change my approach of few times and get better at naming my variables for the sake me not getting mixed up. I know a lot of these problems could be solved with very few lines of code. But I realized that I needed all that compartmentalization for me to visualize the parts that I wanted to manipulate. Here is a screenshot of aggressive I was with the number of variables. I will probably laugh at this problem (String-2 > mixString) by the end of this course. But for now, the mixString problem is going to haunt me for a while. 

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Another thing that I need to work on is cleaner looking code and following best practices. For the sake of this assignment, I tried to just brute force relearning syntax. But I as dug deeper into the harder problems. Reading my own code, became a nightmare. Making a bunch of if statements may get the code to run. But trying to pinpoint where the code failed was very tedious. 

On a more positive note, there is nothing more exhilarating than solving a problem that had me pulling my hair out. Although some may be super easy, getting in some coding time really is what I was looking forward to the most. After getting a sneak peek at our first project: Bootleg Pokémon, I am filled to the brim with excitement. 



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