Journal 11

March 19 - March 25

For this assignment, I worked with my teammates Austin Shatswell, Tim Mujeci, and Brandon Nhep. Overall, my code was good, as it worked and passed all tests. Some of the feedback I received included creating more descriptive Javadoc comments and simplifying if/ else if statements by combining them with ||/ &&. I agree with both of these points, and will try to fix this in the future in order to make more uniform and simpler code. When providing feedback for their code, I also noticed that two of them did not have very descriptive Javadoc comments as well, so perhaps a lot of students in the course may be struggling in this area. When discussing, we talked about not being taught this in previous classes, and the three of us (not Brandon) had to go back and add all of the comments at the end since we were not used to implementing them as we worked. We also each felt nervous about getting our code to pass the autograder on Github, as many of us had code that worked and passed all 12 local tests, but did not pass on Github.

We each agreed that the assignment was not very difficult and we completed the project relatively quickly in comparison to the amount of time given to complete the work. We did not have any tests in particular that were difficult to pass, but we each struggled with minor setbacks during the coding process. For me, my IntelliJ program was not allowing me to use the Dice import and gave me errors any time I tried to instantiate or reference the elements ArrayList. I had to do a meeting with Polina in which I shared my screen and sent her copies of my code to look at, and she was as stumped as I was. In the end, all 12 of my local tests passed despite the program still giving me these errors, so coding around that was frustrating to say the least. This issue has still not been resolved even after deleting and redownloading the application. Despite these program errors, there was not much else I struggled with and I found this project to be quite easy. I completed most of the assignment on the first check-in in about 1.5 hours of work. My biggest victory was being able to complete the work despite getting frustrated with the meaningless errors, and doing my best to problem solve the issue through various means (TA/ Internet/ teammates/ classmates, etc.). I believe my problem-solving skills were put to the test and working with these issues was a bit of a handicap that I still overcame in the end.