Journal 10

March 12 - March 18

To my surprise, I actually really enjoyed working on HW 01. Upon first reading the assignment, I was not very intrigued by the prompt (the knock-off Pokemon project is more fun), but the satisfaction of creating working code was worth the boring topic. In past classes that covered Java, I was not exposed to working with HashMaps, so this homework was very informative. the bulk of the code was not too hard to work on, it was relatively straightforward and the instructions on the prompt are very easy to follow. I ran into issues at the end where I kept getting nothing randomly generated for the key __$ and was pulling my hair out trying to add print lines to each method to try and find where I was going wrong. I finally realized that I never added the portion of addLine() to the readFile method, so I was never entering anything into the words HashMap (lol). We left it as a println instead of addLine() during the lab, and I never left myself a TODO note to change it. That's just the fun part about coding, right? Everything is correct, but one tiiiiiny little detail will ruin the entire project. 

This week, in comparison to the last, has shown me that I truly cannot procrastinate on the work in this course. Week 1 had very easy assignments, and I got almost the entirety of the LDPM Project done in about an hour, so I wrongfully assumed I could save weekly assignments for the last day. Seeing that I am submitting this at the last second, I will definitely be more cautious of how I am spreading out my time in this class. One can be great at coding, but one is not immune to making silly little mistakes that take hours to debug!