Ignore the title if you want to. I'm tired and it's the first thing I came up with.

Feeling somewhat defeated by this week, I decided to write my post earlier than usual. The time I spend blogging is really relaxing for me.

Here are the highlights from CS 313E this week:
We discussed singly linked lists and doubly linked lists in detail. In continuation of our focus on Python data structures, we explored linked list data types. It's really helpful for me to actually draw the linked list and visualize the effects each attribute has on the information in the list.

My name was *finally* called in class. Of course it was called when I was least expecting it. Thankfully (hopefully), I answered my question gracefully. My name was called during one of our usual post-quiz discussions on Wednesday. I was tasked with the discussion of number 2 on Quiz #21. The question was, 
"What data member could you add to sllist to make it possible to define append() and pop() efficiently?"  and the correct answer is 'none'.

There was no quiz today (Friday). Shocking. Really a shocker for me. Now I'm kind of scared for what Professor Downing has planned for Monday's quiz. Will it be twice the length of regular quizzes? Will it count for twice as many points? Was there really no quiz today? So many questions.

We got our Exam 1 Scores back. While I'm not upset about my grade, I'm opting for 'no comment' on this subject :) --Maybe next week...

Our third class project was due. Again, no comment. 

And with that, I'm off! See y'all next week.
--
JL

These weeks are going by so quickly now. Between Senior Design, recruiting events, school, my internship, and life, sleep is something I would probably pay for daily.

This past weekend I participated in HackTX, a hackathon at The University of Texas at Austin. To say the least, it was life-changing! I'm definitely going to write up a full post about it on my other blog so be sure to check it out!

Anyway. You came here to read about CS 313E.

Well, we've switched focus from the first exam to Project 3. I really like this project! It deals with the Australian Voting algorithm. Instead of choosing who their favorite candidate/desired winner is, voters rank all candidates in the order they would want them to win. The two exist cases are 1) if one candidate has more than 50% of the votes, or 2) if all candidates still in the running are tied. In case 1, that candidate is the clear winner and in case 2, all tied candidates are winners. If neither case is achieved, we look at the votes, cut out all candidates tied for the lowest score, and recount their ballots based on their second, third, fourth, and so on choice until we reach one of our exit cases. Our task is to develop and code that algorithm in Python.

We spent the first part of last week discussing Project 3 and the second part discussing Python data structures. Our focus was on 'list', 'deque', and 'linked list'. We went through each data structure and studied the cost/complexity of 1) adding elements to the beginning, middle, and end, 2) removing elements from the beginning, middle, and end, and 3) indexing elements. We also touched a bit on stacks and queues and their respective lifo/fifo functionalities. I'm really interested in learning more details about Python data structures.

Funny Story: When I first saw the word 'deque' (pronounced: deck), I thought it was a misspelling of 'dequeue' (pronounced: dee-cue).

Thanks for reading!
--
JL

A few minutes before our exams were distributed, someone joked, "What if the exam is just one long Python project?". They weren't too far off.

We were told ahead of time that the exam would consist only of writing code. What I can absolutely say is that the content of the exam was what I expected. What I did not expect was how we were tested on our understanding of each concept. Our exam surrounded the idea of prime numbers and of course it covered all of the major topics Professor Downing has been stressing since the beginning of the semester. We had to build a class. We had to know how to build an iterator and an iterable. Non-surprisingly, we had to write tests using asserts. However, instead of direct questions asking to "make a list iterator" or "use map/zip", we were given problem statements and had to determine the appropriate usage of each major concept. I'm definitely not complaining with this type of testing, I think it's a learning experience in itself as we gauge our personal understanding of Python and Software Design as a whole.

Another given - it absolutely helped that I prepared a guide sheet ahead of time. As Professor Downing mentioned beforehand, the actual sheet wasn't of much use during the exam compared to the utility of preparing the sheet before the exam.

So the exam wasn't "super fun" but it wasn't "super terrible" either! Now it's just time to wait for the results and get started on Project 3.

Thanks for reading and I'll see y'all next week! :)
-JL

Well it's definitely October a.k.a. Midterm season. With that comes the CS 313E Exam 1!

So from last week's post I mentioned that I generally mark pieces of my notes that I personally think would be wonderful target areas while studying for our first CS 313E exam. Yesterday Professor Downing posted the exam review on Piazza and many of the topics and bits of code that I marked as important were on the review as well!

In the review, as well as in class, Professor Downing stressed that a very effective study strategy involves testing yourself and writing lots of code. Continuing with the collaborative theme of the class, it's crucial to be a part of a study group. I definitely agree that self- and group-quizzing are extremely effective study strategies. I've been strengthening my Python skills by reviewing the methods we learned in class and actually running them on my own. I'm really looking forward to getting quizzed by my classmates. When you work and study with other people, your learning process is much more well-rounded than it would be with individual efforts.

*Sidenote*: I find it interesting that our exam is an evening exam! I really appreciate the extra 30 minutes we get though. 

Good luck to all of my classmates! I'll be back next week with a report on how the exam went.

See y'all then! :)
-JL