IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.
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Asshat wormie
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Just an Update as this thread was originally my questions about majoring in CS. I am now a Junior and will hopefully graduate in a year or so.
Today I begin another round of CS classes. Discrete Math, Software Dev, and another Data Structure and Algorithms class. I've already taken one data structures class, I think this one is more theoretical and will deal with analyzing more than implementation of data structures. As mentioned in another post, I did some research over the summer (internship) and will be continuing it this semester. I am also taking 2 other classes (full load 18 hours ugh) so hopefully this semester doesn't crush me. I hope after this year I can get an internship out of state, or at least something outside my Uni. Need to beef up my resume and skillset before graduation. /cheers
Noodleface
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The Data Structures and Algorithms class is going to assume you know a bunch of data structures and teach you a bunch of algorithms around them, like traversing trees and other stupid shit.
Asshat wormie
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Thats a silly way to look at one of the most important classes to computational thinking.
Depends on real-world. In a real world you'll pretty much never have to write your own data structure and the algorithms to traverse it. Basically any flavor of Map, Set, List, Tree is already implemented somewhere for you.
Noodleface
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ShakyJake
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Right, but it's important to know which tool to use for the job. For example, a fellow developer was using a List and, before adding to it, would iterate over it to make sure the object wasn't already added. It didn't occur to him, or he wasn't aware of, to simply use a HashSet.
Asshat wormie
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Its why i called it an important class in "computational thinking" not in using data structures
I mean that is really just knowing Collections 101. I'm not sure if a data structures class would help that. You could pretty much explain the purpose of when to use a Set, Map, List, Queue in less than an afternoon.
moontayle
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So, hard at work on my next project. Figured out a few things and wrote out some basic stuff regarding the overall approach I'm probably going to take. Talked to the Senior Dev and we came up with a few wrinkles and identified some technical debt but nothing insurmountable and some of it's stuff they want to do anyway. So while her and some others work out how to handle a couple of the wrinkles from the Server side, I forked one of the apps I'm going to need to work on and started into it.
Some of this requires a bit of refactoring of current code, which honestly I kind of want to do anyway for reasons I've already discussed. And then sometimes, sometimes it allows you to identify stupid shit and get rid of it. I started in on a refactor of a method called 'cleanUp'. It basically gets rid of old, useless files that might still be hanging around. Except... if it identifies a zip file it unzips it... and then deletes all the unzipped files. I kind of hope someone might be able to explain that logic to me because I tried for a good five minutes to wrap my head around the concept.
Some of this requires a bit of refactoring of current code, which honestly I kind of want to do anyway for reasons I've already discussed. And then sometimes, sometimes it allows you to identify stupid shit and get rid of it. I started in on a refactor of a method called 'cleanUp'. It basically gets rid of old, useless files that might still be hanging around. Except... if it identifies a zip file it unzips it... and then deletes all the unzipped files. I kind of hope someone might be able to explain that logic to me because I tried for a good five minutes to wrap my head around the concept.
Hmm I did that last semester. Our last data structures were Binary Search Trees and Heaps. Balancing BST screwed me up for a bit because trying to follow multiple recursive methods was just nerve racking. Right now I could not balance a BST without looking some stuff up. Probably the only data structure we went over last semester that I couldn't write without references right now. Like I said though, I think this class is more of the theory behind them. Probably more time complexity calculations. I just picked up the book an hour ago so well see.
ShakyJake
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Khane
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Weird chick who is crazy in bed. Who thought Khane would find love in the comp sci thread?
Noodleface
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moontayle
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I spend a good hour to two hours in the morning (while the coffee starts working its magic) doing reading and research. Currently spending a lot of time reading about RxJava/RxAndroid (reactive extensions) and while it's a heady concept, I can't help but feel that using it is going to massively improve how our background services work since a lot is based on reacting to certain events.
I'm also doing some reading about Square's OkHttp library. Google completely ripped out all the Apache Http stuff from Marshmallow (they deprecated it with Lollipop first though) so if we ever want to advance along the flavors some changes are going to need to be made.
I'm also doing some reading about Square's OkHttp library. Google completely ripped out all the Apache Http stuff from Marshmallow (they deprecated it with Lollipop first though) so if we ever want to advance along the flavors some changes are going to need to be made.