From Scrubs to Scripts: My Leap into Coding

Week 2 Journal Entry Recursion has been a difficult journey for me so far. I was introduced to recursion in a previous class, but coming back to it again is still challenging. Understanding base cases and visualizing how the code flows step-by-step takes a lot of practice and deeper understanding. One of the hardest parts for me is trusting that the recursive calls are actually moving toward the solution. Sometimes I understand what the code is supposed to do, but I still get stuck figuring out how the function “unwinds” and returns the correct value. It’s easy to make mistakes when the recursive logic is slightly off, and even small errors in the base case can cause infinite recursion or incorrect results. Tracing recursion step-by-step has been helping me slowly build confidence and understand the pattern behind the code. Another topic that I’ve been working on this week is Big-O notation, which has been helping me think about efficiency instead of just whether my program works...

Spring 2026 CSUMB Design and Analysis is the first class of the new year! Our cohort is expected to graduate this December, and I am really looking forward to completing my degree. This first week in Design and Analysis was quite jam-packed with material. Most of it was review, as some of our earlier classes exposed us to these concepts. Although it was mostly an overview of many different topics, it felt like a precursor to the challenges that lie ahead. We went over the basic principles of pseudocode and how helpful it can be when designing an algorithm. The whole point of pseudocode is to make it in English but programming-language agnostic. It's meant to serve as the scaffolding used to create an algorithm. Out of all the material we covered, I believe the fake coin puzzle was the most interesting. Solving it with the three comparisons was quite easy. It almost felt like binary search by constantly cutting the dataset in half. But the two-comparison solution was the most int...