Journal 12

 March 26 - April 1

I worked with my three group mates Tim, Austin, and Brandon (we are good friends). My strategy for solving the assignments was to dive in and create shells of each method, then go through and implement them one by one based on which methods called others. I typically do not plan my code out on paper, and create //TODO notes instead. Each of my teammates agreed that they jumped right into the coding process, and we each found the instructions to be very clear and descriptive, so it was easy to start right away without outside planning. However, we talked about future projects where there may not be as concise of instructions, and we agreed that creating some sort of notes for a plan would be a good way to begin the work and organize our thoughts. I would not go back and change my strategy, as I found the project to be quite easy, and I completed the project very quickly in comparison to the amount of time we had to complete it. During the first check-in, I wrote the entirety of the Monster.java class in less than two hours of work, and check-in 2 had me finish the subclasses quite quickly (they were pretty much copies of each other). 

According to my classmates, my Javadoc comments are adequate, but could use more description as they are quite bland. Brandon's comments are very thorough, and I will try to write them like his in the future as I enjoyed his style. I did not know I could automate some of the style guide rules during the project, and will be sure to do so in future assignments. 

The most challenging part for me was my IntelliJ not functioning as it should. I did not find any setbacks in the actual code, but my application was bugging and giving me a bunch of unnecessary errors. I was getting quite frustrated and, in the end, was unable to fix this issue. Luckily, we are moving on to Android Studio, so I can just ignore this issue for now. The most interesting part for me was the amount of code I remembered. I honestly have not worked in Java for a while now, but I was happy to find out that the language came back quite easily for me and I recalled a lot of the different data structures without needing to review them online. I am most proud of my problem solving skills, and I believe I completed the project quite early considering my issues with procrastination. I have been working on that, and I think this project showed me that sitting down and getting it done early, or at the very least working on chunks of a large assignment at a time, can be very beneficial for me. I celebrated completing this assignment by going out and getting drunk at a local karaoke night with my friends (we sang Chevelle lol).