Gerek's ByteTrail Oydssey

               This week we worked on a Markov project. It was fun to utilize things like punctuation detection to work on word associations to generate random sentences. Both of my group members did well on their Markov project this week. We all had similar approaches with different twists. It was interesting to see how many different imports can be implemented to get the same results within our methods. I like how the lecture briefly tied in the similarities in this sort of thing to systems like ChatGPT that utilize similar principles on a way larger scale. The Markov project tracks single-word associations, but advanced models like this handle multiple tokens and use neural networks to predict the next word or token. But the lecture also mentioned these models often require extensive training data and sophisticated algorithms to achieve high accuracy. Something else that was briefly touched on was the ethical considerations of this data ...

                 This week I worked with my team members to review our code on some Book, Reader and Shelf classes from a Library project. The library project had us develop books, readers, and shelves in a library, allowing operations like adding, removing, and listing items. It included creating to handle various functionalities like checking out and returning books and initializing the system from a file. We used standardized error handling using predefined codes to ensure consistent and clear reporting of operation outcomes. My approach was to start with the easy code. By following the style guide, I wrote the constants, fields, getters and setters. Most of this was autogenerated with IntelliJ as well. Then I worked on the logic within the special methods. I had a pdf of the overview handy to make sure I adhered to the specifications the methods needed. I ran tests in between methods to see if they passed. And lastly, I went back t...

This week had to review a Histogram class that was completed in the previous week. I reviewed Andrew and Adrain's code this week and received feedback from Andrew on the project. This was my first-time reviewing code in an academic environment. I think looking at other’s code helped me compare my strengths and weaknesses. This project particularly highlighted my weaknesses. If I took the time, I could really write some more robust code. Andrew noticed some redundancies in my code in a couple of functions. He also noted that my method of displaying the histogram on the console could use some improvement. He stated it lists out the letters in order. These were some valuable suggestions that could be improved to make my code better. The read method took the longest to complete and I’m glad we were walked through it, but I should have taken the challenge to see if I can make it better. Because we were helped through a lot of this project, the difficulties I experienced were writing t...

     Coming into this course I was a bit concerned because I only know an ounce of Java. I think following the lectures and re-watching the material really helped with not only the set-up of the course and some of the fundamentals of the language. I really appreciated that the lectures catered to people with various experience levels and provided great explanations of the software we’re using. At this point in time, I feel a lot more familiar with the environment. The most challenging part for me was taking the time to sit down and comprehend what was happening within the code. Although week 1 was mainly about setting up, it gave me the confidence that I have the opportunity to do well.      Something that came in clutch for me this week was the UML diagrams. I only studied UML in theory before, but it is actually very helpful in understanding the bigger picture. So much so that I was pleased to learn how to generate a diagram. I realized that illustratio...