Software Design: Journal 2

-What was most challenging?

    I had a hard time taking in every part that was required for this project. Being able to break everything up into separate parts was how I went about doing this project, but the act of breaking things apart I found incredibly difficult.

-What was the easiest?

    The easiest part of this project was being guided by the documentation that the professor wrote.

-What are you most proud of?

    I am most proud of seeing the project slowly come to life. Seeing how I overcame issues that felt impossible to fix at some points in the past.

-What topics from the class were the most useful for this assignment?

    Inheritance. Just knowing how some of the default methods found in Java are inherited from other classes was incredibly helpful; this helped me with knowing how I can "string along" methods that were not in the original object I was working with.

-What changes / improvements would/did you make to the assignment?

    In general, I would say readability. There is some stuff in my files that really should be written with comments explaining why they are there. I think if this was a professional environment, it would be hard for someone to know what some of the stuff I wrote was actually doing.

-If you could give yourself some advice about the assignment, what would it be?

    It is going to take way longer than what the assignments says it will take. Start sooner.

Software Design: Journal 1

1.  Who did you work with?
1. For the Markov project, I mostly worked alone and figure out the different methods on my own. I did get some ideas from the class Discord our cohort has, but I worked alone.
2. Strategy for solving Markov?
1. For this project, I decided to firstly figure out each section that builds on the next one. Once I made sure that the section (i.e. method) was passing the tests and working properly, I moved on to the next one. Essentially, I was solving one small problem at a time. I planned it on a whiteboard.
3. Teammates strategy?
1. Although I did not work with my team on this assignment, we did discuss it afterwards. My three other teammates' strategy was very similar to mine, solve the easy foundation first, before moving on to the next part.
4. Different strategy?
1. I personally would not change the way I went about solving this problem. Perhaps looking at all the cases (for example hamlet.txt) could be beneficial. At first, I didn't realize that hamlet.txt has so many new lines and tabs.
5. Google Java Style
1. My code follows very closely the Google Java Style.