CSC148 SLOG for week4

It was a tough night. My teammates and I fought for Assignment 1 all night long and finally finished it at 7 this morning. Thank god! We made it! Though I thought it was a torture during that time, I have to admit I’ve learned something critical for mastering computer science through this procedure.

1.Preciseness. Compared with natural language, programming language needs one hundred percent preciseness to make a command. For instance, once  we used a method imported from a class we had made. All of us thought we were using it in a ‘proper’ way, but it still raised error when we ran it. Having checked several times, we found the reason. Brackets! We wasted more than twenty minutes  just because we forgot to add a pair of brackets after this method’s name. So learning computer science does train us to treat a problem cautiously and precisely.

2.Patience. Without exaggeration, I considered to give up thousands of times during last night. Many times, we thought we had done everything right but it just could not run out successfully. We need to double check again and again in order to find out a little bug, maybe just a pair of brackets. This process sometimes made us feel annoyed and even desperate. I even thought about dropping this course. However, when we clam down digging into the code, we did can find the bug and fix it. The pleasure and sense of achievement we got for the first time running our game successfully was really unforgettable.

3.Teamwork. Many hands make light work. I don’t think I could finish Assignment 1 such ‘perfectly’ without the help from my teammates. They could always come up with some brilliant ideas when I was stuck with difficulties. Thank you guys!

CSC148 SLOG for week3

Before today, the word ‘geeks’, in my mind, stood for those people who are talented in coding. So I thought programming might be the only thing they need to care about until I got the topic for  this week’s SLOG. Why geeks need to know how to write? With curiosity, I started digging it and was totally shocked by the power of writing in daily language when I learned the success of Linus Torvalds.

There may be thousands of reasons for why geeks need to write. So I will only mention three of them which are most essential in my opinion. First and foremost, writing is one of the most efficient way for communication. It helps programmer to share idea with others and get others’ comments by the same time which may help you to improve your code. Either of them will eventually contributes to the success of program developing. In other words, mastering a programming language makes you ‘talk’ to computers better, but writing in a daily language such as English gives you chance to exchange ideas with people which is far more critical. Just like Joel Spolsky said, ‘The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is whether they can communicate their ideas’. Secondly, writing also does good to logical thinking. It may sound weird since we always regard writing as arts workers’ task not for computer scientists. However, writing with a good structure to express your idea clearly and persuasively does need logical thinking. Being good at writing, you are able to tell your user what your code can do via an outstanding technical documentation and this is the best way to show the value of your code. Finally, writing is recording. When you look back to those blog or diary you’ve written through learning, it will be like a ‘milestone’ preserving your process from being a rookie to a real ‘geek’. It’s fun, isn’t it?

In a nutshell, writing skill is as important as programming for geeks. Although writing SLOG every week seems a burden to me now, I will try my best to get used to it and finally handle it.