From ME to CS Journey

 The first week of CST334 has been interesting, since I've always wondered how computers bridge the gap between hardware and software, and it seems like the OS is the glue that holds it all together.  I remember back in the lower division course of Computer Architecture, the professor spoke about how data is placed in memory and seeing where in the memory this information is being stored.  He was careful to point out that the memory address that was seen is not exactly the hardware memory address because of virtualization.  Then in the first week of this course we were exposed to virtualization to see how the OS manages the flow of information.  I find that all the computer things I've learned in the past through online tutorials like setting up linux machines, etc, are coming together, to understand why that command I copy and pasted to change file permissions are actually doing!

 The top 3 important topics I learned in this course are probably the following: SQL Database Design  Learning databases are designed and how information is organized and categorized in tables CRUD Operations Understanding CRUD operations is essential for building applications that interact with databases, as it covers how to add, retrieve, modify, and remove data.   NoSQL like Mongodb It’s important to understand the benefits and use cases for NoSQL databases, like scalability and handling unstructured data, as well as their trade-offs compared to relational databases.

 I 100% prefer MongoDB, it's very intuitive compared to SQL statements, since it's more modern.   Some similarities are the CRUD operations, which makes going from SQL to MongoDB easy to handle. I do like how flexible the data is stored in MongoDB rather than SQL.

 Well hello! it's been awhile hasn't it? Even though indexes are generally fast and enhance query performance, but if the database is poorly designed and/or maintained then the index would have a negative effect on performance. For example table data can be unsorted and the index scan has to search all matching indexes instead of just finding a single matching value. .

Taking a look back at HW1 Histogram  After looking at Histogram assignment, I feel like some operations could be handled in a different class.  For example a separate class to read in the file.  Then another class that does the counting of letters and counts, as well as creating a histogram.  Then the main class is one that handles all the class creation and displaying the histogram.   Highlighting two victories   Looking back to see where I started and now I'm impressed at how much I've learning especially in software design.  I learned to appreciate creating class diagrams early on to visualize how information flows and create a better product at the end.  I actually started implementing this strategy at work for some simple python tools.   The 2nd victory would be Android programming in general since I originally had no clue how Android programming worked.  I heard it's close to java, but has it's own built in libraries and built...

 I worked with Rahim, Jess, and Saria to review the Markov assignment.  Honestly, I just started coding right away, just going through the hw prompt, but did notice that some methods depended on others so I just worked through each. Everyone else seemed to be more methodical approach than my just do it approach.  In particular Jess started work on methods that did not depend on other methods.  Saria, did more planning upfront to understand how the data flows.  If I were to approach this assignment differently than I would probably would understand how the data will flow through each method and see what the dependencies are.  According to my classmates, my code seemed to follow the Google guidelines very well.

The histogram hw was a fun little project that I enjoyed doing.  The sorting portion was the most difficult and everyone mostly wrote the code the same way.   The sorting code was a struggle since I had to remember how I did it from years ago!  I'm impressed with how IntelliJ does all the autogeneration, which saves so much typing!  I remember having to write all that from scratch.