CST 338 Week 2

Week 2

This week has been great. We were assigned new teams, which was the first time since this program started and I am very glad to switch it up a bit. Working with my new team was great. Everyone is familiar with git and we utilized GitHub to keep track of our code and share updates between each other. It worked out well.

The material for this week has been Java-specific lectures. I'm very familiar with Java (though I haven't used it in a while), so it hasn't been an issue for me and I feel like I'm cruising along. Working on the program was very refreshing and I found myself getting into finding all of the bugs and squashing them! Once I start, it's really hard to put it down and it made me a bit sleepy at work the following days. I am going to try to settle down and give myself same rest in future weeks.

Specific prompts

OOP is not in all languages.  Have you used one that does not?

Many people don't follow OOP with JavaScript. I use JavaScript very often and most of the time it is not in an OOP way. However, I may be known to utilize prototypes to facilitate an OOP-style language. Other than that, I don't have any experience outside of OOP (unless you count bash).

What was your experience?

OOP has been drilled into my head over time in all of my previous courses. I find it very difficult to not follow it now. I don't feel like it's intuitive and reading through the code can be very difficult. I work with several people that have functional programming backgrounds and I always have a difficult time reading through their work. However, I find it beneficial for me to have exposure to their coding style.

How extensively have you used OOP outside of the classroom?

I have used OOP more outside of the classroom than within it. I work with large applications daily that rely on this principle. It has led me to believe that it's a strong foundation and many people would benefit from understanding it. I'm actually really glad that I am able to go back through and learn it from the ground up again because it never hurts to relearn something. There may be little bits that I have missed.

Are you experience with UML diagrams and do they help?

I'm experienced with UML diagrams, but I wouldn't call myself an expert. I often draw little (simpler) UML diagram for my own reference at work when I'm learning a new application. If the database isn't too large, I'll keep a little picture of one near to understand the application better. Having said that, my work does not use UML diagrams at all. They used to create them, but found that they were never referenced by programmers and the clients didn't care what the database looked like so they were not useful and were a waste of time (money). For my work context, my company is 19 years old and we're contracted out by other companies to build web applications.