Week 5: map() and reduce()

Netflix is over and turned in! :D

For this week's post, I decided to share with you all how I generally come up with topics to write about each week. So far, I haven't missed a day of class. I find it very interesting to just listen to the discussions and the daily quizzes keep me on my toes. It's also really interesting when Professor Downing calls on individual students to participate in the discussion. I'm not really sure how each student is chosen but it seems to have something to do with how the roster is setup. I keep hearing the same student, David Balderama, get called. Poor David! My name has only been called once and that was during the first week of school. My viewpoint is that I want to get called on just so I can participate in the discussion BUT I would love to know ahead of time so that I can prepare to answer correctly.  ....Only in a perfect world ha!

Anyway, the whole point of that spiel on my class attendance was to share how I come up with blogpost ideas. Generally, as I take handwritten notes in class, I star topics or bits of code that I find especially interesting. Sometimes I even leave a little note that says something like "good idea for blogpost" or "might be on the exam".

This week, the two topics I found most interesting came from two of our quizzes. We were tasked with calculating the outputs of Python's map() and reduce()  built-in functions given the quiz inputs. It was a good learning exercise to be able to understand the algorithm behind the functions before Professor Downing revealed that they were both already built into the language. I'm 98% sure these two functions are also going to be on the exam!