1/23 - 1/27 Software Engineering Introductory Blog Post!

Good afternoon, everybody!

This will be the home of my weekly blog posts for my software engineering class, CS373.  So far, this class has been pretty challenging.  Professor Downing definitely keeps everybody awake and on their toes with his style of lecture, which I really like.  Although many people are put on the spot for questions daily, it definitely reasserts the knowledge that I've learned in college thus far.  I'm not very good at answering questions (regardless of how easy the question may be, I tend to overanalyze/become hesitant/nervous/etc) but I think this will help me be a better Q/A kind of person later in the future when I start my career.

I've really enjoyed what we've learned in class so far.  Learning about the different forms of caches has been pretty interesting.  You can make a lazy cache, which fills up values only when they're computed; or you can make an eager cache, which computes every value possible and then fills up an array with those values.  Or, you could do a meta cache, which is an already-computed list of values that you can just stuff into your program.  I've found that to be very interesting, and it is definitely one of those things that you need to test out in order to figure out which kind of cache is optimal for the program you're designing.

The seemingly-trivial questions about Java syntax has actually surprised me; it isn't really as easy as I thought it would be! From realizing that an obvious conditional statement of comparing two different objects would not compiles, to rejuvenating my lost knowledge on public/private/protected methods and public/final classes, it certainly has been a learning experience.  I've also come to realize that Python's syntax, while very unusual to me still, is so much nicer than Java.  Java requires packages, extraneous classes to do input/output, and lengthy syntax to do seemingly easy things.  Python just seems so...nice! The classless thing has always been kind of weird to me, but I've been used to that with good ol' PHP.

Anyway, it's been a pretty interesting ride so far; let's see where we go to next in this class!

See y'all tomorrow,

Corey