CST338 - My Course Achievements

This semester has been a great learning experience for me. Throughout this course, one of my biggest victories was working on Android Studio for the first time. It felt intimidating at first, but as I worked through the setup and started building my first app, I gained knowledge that helped me better understand the lecture videos and slides. I can now navigate the platform more comfortably and understand how it connects all the parts of an application. Another big win for me was using GitHub. Before this class, I had never worked with version control, but now I understand how to push and pull changes and manage repositories, which will be a very useful skill in the future.

I also learned the importance of planning my program before writing code. Creating use cases helped me organize my ideas and understand what each method needs to do. This step made the programming process smoother and allowed me to avoid a lot of mistakes. Another improvement I noticed is in writing JUnit tests. At first, it was tricky to understand how testing works, but now I feel more confident writing tests and using them to check that my code works as expected.

Overall, I feel I’ve grown a lot since the start of this course. Learning to work with new tools like Android Studio, IntelliJ, and GitHub, and improving my programming practices with use cases and testing, has made me more confident as a developer. These victories remind me to celebrate progress and keep learning.

CST338 - Markov

For the Markov assignment, I worked with Mathew to discuss and share ideas. My approach was to read through the entire prompt first and make sure I understood how the program should work. After that, I sketched out a diagram with use cases to plan the structure and flow of the program before starting to write the code. This method helped me stay organized and gave me a clear idea of what I needed to do. Mathew also read the prompt carefully but preferred to start by tackling the easier functions first. Then, he worked on the more complex parts later, which I used to do in the past.

Reflecting on this assignment, I realized that planning with use cases is extremely helpful. I learned this from the Library assignment, and it made coding much smoother this time. I also made sure to follow the Google Java Style Guide carefully, especially by adding comments to explain my code. This is something I didn’t do as much in the past, and it made my program easier to understand.