Week 9 Report

    This week is technically our first in CST 338: Software Design, a course for Java fundamentals and a good introduction for software engineering. Already I have learned a ridiculous amount of new knowledge, particularly about working with GitHub, IntelliJ, and Java classes. Our professor and TA are really cool, which makes the learning process easier. 

    For our first week, we completed several assignments including progress in CodingBat, which is to help us get comfortable with strings, arrays, hash maps and whatnot in Java. When it came to tackling the problems in CodingBat, I would briefly plan out the solution in my head into at least two steps and then write the beginning of each part in the compiler. For instance, in many of the problems I would generate variables and then get to the loop to complete the task. The problems were actually fun, they are like little puzzles. It would take me usually at least two tries to get the proper solution, though often I got it on the first thankfully. None of the problems were particularly frustrating, especially since we are just barely getting acquainted with Java. 

    We also got to learn about UML and Unit testing with Junit which looks like a great technique for software development. In test driven development, test coverage refers to what percent of the code in the program is covered by unit tests, and the more test coverage one can build, the better, usually. We got to put many of these skills to use in our full calorie homework, Jotto Guess, which is basically a mini project in Java for a text based word guessing game. I am grateful that we received quite a bit of starter code from Dr. C, because that was probably the more complicated code since it involved Unit testing and several instances of File objects being summoned with respective try catch blocks. The process for completing Jotto was rough at first, since there was much researching to be made regarding Java syntax, array list methods, and other fundamentals. My favorite part was actually creating the method getLetterCount(), which compares how similar two words are and returns a score for it. 

I am hyped for learning more about Java and software development in this course.