cs online - ralva

I worked with Branden from my team. With this assignment (and with most assignments) I always try to work directly off the prompt, filling out each defined method from the UML diagram of the assignment. Once I feel good about implementation, I use the unit test as a guide to help debug and get each function fully ironed out. Afterwards I go back in, format and clean up variable names and add single line comments for clarity. Through this process I am working through the logic in my code 2-3 times which leads to a cleaner output. Branden mentioned his strategy was, “For Project 1, I took it one step at a time. I started with the Monster class and followed the prompt closely, making sure each method matched what was expected, especially with things like output formatting and phrases. I tested as I built each part, and when something didn’t work, I used the error messages to figure out what needed fixing. I created each monster type one by one and kept everything organized using Git branc...

How fun to do some code review. I often tell early career engineers that as you progress in your career you will tend to read more code than write it, as architectural reviews, design docs and pull request reviews become a major part of a Software Engineer's day. I reviewed all three of my team members code. Overall it was a good exercise, and especially interesting to see how each of them approached the problem in a different way. What improvements would you make to your code/what was suggested?  Definitely some good learnings in looking at other group members code. Just from observation, I think I would likely add a little more thorough explanation in my JavaDoc comments. One of my group members really added a lot of detail there and I could see how helpful that would be looking at the code months from now. As far as critical feedback to my code, I agree with all of it. Adding Javadoc comments for all methods Use a StringBuilder to increase the efficiency of my makeGuess() functi...

Week 1 was a fun week that jumped right into some good coding exercises in Java. It touched upon a bunch of different themes like basic Java, Unit Tests, Git, Interfaces and more. I could probably write a lot about how much I fought with IntelliJ (let's be honest it's not the best) but will touch on more substantiative topics. First let's talk about unit tests. I know JUnit would not be considered a first-class citizen, but the way it is autogenerated by IntelliJ is quite sleek. In that sense writing unit tests and running them is extremely easy. We often read about TDD (test driven development) as a paradigm some organizations use, and building out tests in Java for our exercises really makes me see the value for that approach. Not only does it verify the output for a given input, it also helps us write our functions in a more ... well functional kind of way. I would argue that if you can't write a unit tests, that may actually be a code smell more than anything else. ...