Week 12

 Now this was a busy week. Not coursework, but a lot of holiday prep. Thanksgiving is literally day after tomorrow and here I am trying to get coding work done. This week's work saw us delve into the workings of Android studio in greater formality. As much as I wish I could go into greater detail, the writing prompt for this journal that Dr. C had provided wanted me to go over my solution to the major project the class had finished last week. The project was called Legally Distinct Pocket Monster, or LDPM for short.  

Granted the prompt also directly stated that I was to work with at least one other student, but I couldn't get that to happen. Equal parts the bedlam of upcoming holidays and my own shortfalls in time-management. I'll get the latter sorted out at some point. Hopefully. Maybe. Probably. 

In any case, I won't be able to answer every question on the prompt. Obviously not the ones that mention the approaches of my fellow student, at least. Solving the assignment started, largely, by jumping in and writing the code. Granted there was already some form of written documentation of what was required, so I wouldn't call it jumping in blind, but never the less, it started by way of opening IntelliJ and starting to write the names of the required methods and comment/notes as to what each method needed to do and who to call as needed. In a way, writing out the methods and their comments was planning it out, albeit within the code editor instead of on paper. I can't say I can see myself writing it all out on paper as part of pre-code prep, but I can definitely see myself setting up notes as to how to go about writing the program. 

Irrespective of how one goes about preplanning, the biggest challenge (for me at least) is always debugging. Some of the bugs and issues were, for sure, driving me up the wall, but that's just a thing you sign up for when you go into programming. And yet, despite the frustration, the bug hunt ends up being just as fascinating as watching the code initially go together. Building something, then having to take it apart to see what it's doing and why has a strange appeal to me. Couldn't explain why for the life of me. Maybe its the idea of being both inventor and investigator in assessing a scenario. I don't really know. What I do know is that I was able to get a multi-file java project working properly before the deadline. The last java course I had taken I had a poor score as I couldn't get the blasted things to work. They were either throwing compiler errors over things not existing when they did or the program, if it did compile, either didn't run or didn't do anything it was supposed to without any meaningful explanation. The fact that LDPM ran basically first try was huge for me. So there was yes a need to celebrate the victory. 

As for celebration, I was more than a little exhausted after having gone through as many rounds of debugging. First thing was a nap. Pure and simple. After that? Not really all that sure. The Killing Floor games have be something of a venting series for me since middle school, and I've discovered the Ryu Ga Gotoku franchise, better known in the west as Yakuza. I personally wouldn't be opposed to a nice long gaming/venting session. 

Easily my favorite part to the prompt was the last question. It was, and I quote: "How did you celebrate completing the assignment? If you didn't how will you celebrate? This isn't a joke. It helps our learning to celebrate and acknowledge victories.  <-- Dr.C just fought for your right to party." On that note: Cheers, Dr. C! For keeping up the fight for the right to party!

Although it would've been nice to know about being able to automate application of the Java Style Guide rules sooner. Ah well, better late than never!

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