Collatz

    The last week in software engineering was mostly about the project. The project was due on Wed at 8 pm, and I was working on it till 7:45 pm! That is pretty last minute for me, but there were so many details in this project to worry about that I wanted to make sure I had everything right. The program that we wrote needed to be accepted by Sphere, and this gave me an opportunity to learn about a cool online code judge. It was cool, but also a bit frustrating, because Sphere just says wrong solution, without showing specific test cases where the solution failed. This made it very hard to debug the program, but I guessed that they do not want to reveal test cases, in case people try to hard code solutions in their program!
    But anyway, apart from Sphere, it took a while to set up the git repository. I think it is really useful for version control though. In previous classes, I have tried to do some version control myself, which involved keeping copies of entire folders locally. Finally everything got really messy, and I always got confused as to which the latest folder is!
    The reading for the week was the rest of the Extreme Programming book, which talked about test first programming, and the importance of writing Unit Tests. I thought that was really insightful, since I sometimes get bored of writing tests. However, I am inspired to write more tests in the future. We also read a couple of articles about pair programming. I have always liked pair programming, and I am glad that we get to work with a partner for the next assignment. I think two heads are better than one, and working with someone else also makes homework fun! That rhymed!