5th Week of Class

                This week was, for the most part, a pretty good week in the land of Object Oriented Programming. Our second programming project was due this past Wednesday, and I think my partner and I did a pretty good job. We did find ourselves rewriting most of our code at one point, however, when we found that we were overcomplicating our solution. I don’t think Prof. Downing has specifically mentioned it in class, but he does espouse the general spirit of the KISS design principle, which is otherwise known as “keep it simple, stupid,” when it comes to programming. If we’d have kept this in mind, we might have saved ourselves some time. Instead, we just kind of forgot and tried to implement the first idea that came to mind, which wasn’t necessarily the simplest solution we could have come up with. Regardless, we were able to finish reasonably quickly once we that in mind.

                The only downside to this week I would have to say are my grades. While I did get full credit for project 1, I’m still struggling to get anything resembling a decent grade on my quizzes. I’m just not quite sure what to do about them anymore. I pay attention in class, do the assigned readings, and even review the previous lesson’s notes, but I still can’t seem to do well. I suppose the best I can do for now is work on ensuring that my project and test grades are good enough to cover for my quizzes.

                Another thing of note this week was our guest lecture by Aaron Stacy over Git on Friday. We had another guest lecture on Git a couple weeks back, but while that one focused more on how to use Git, this one talked more about the history and potential of the version control system. I honestly enjoy the guest lectures. Its a little change of pace that gives us the opportunity to that may not be directly related to object oriented programming but which many of us would find extremely useful nonetheless. Going through Prof. Downing’s schedule, I don’t think I see any more scheduled, but I hope he adds some in at some point during the semester.