CST 325 - Week 1

 Journal Week 1: Link to Doc

CST 462s - Service Site Reflections

 For this class, I spent my time serving at The Document Foundation doing bug testing. I signed up for this opportunity because I knew it would be a challenge for me and I wanted to expose myself to fields outside of what I normally lean toward. Even with this in mind, getting started with the service hours was difficult for me. I had to learn how to use the software first in order to test bugs along with how to go about the actual testing process. Sometimes I would get stuck trying to figure out if I was actually not able to replicate a bug, or if I was just misunderstanding the problem in question. Luckily, the site supervisor was very accessible for questions and troubleshooting problems and The Document Foundation had good resources via website for some of the problem-solving that needed to happen. Overall, I think the most impactful part for me was seeing how much goes into building "complete" software. Seeing the way that new problems arise or the way that old problems can come back during updates made me really have a lot more patience when dealing with small issues in the software I use regularly. I also gained a lot of respect for the development of software with regards to different operating systems.

My advice for future students would be to get started on the service hours early, as it can take some time getting used to the process and you don't want to be stressed about hours at the end of the semester. Also, communicate with your site supervisor and the other students (if any) who are at the same site as you. They can give you help and advice and save you a lot of wasted time. Lastly, don't get discouraged if you feel like you don't understand something or it's not "clicking" for you. Try to understand that this isn't an achievement-based service, but more an opportunity to learn something new and see if it's something you would want to participate in post-graduation.

CST370 - Week 7

 Studying for the final this week went smoother than expected. My biggest concern was getting a grasp on AVL and 2-3 trees. For whatever reason, constructing these trees just wasn't clicking for me, but after working through some practice problems, I'm feeling more comfortable with the material. The last module introduced Djikstra's algorithm, which determines the shortest path from a single source vertex to each of the other vertices. This algorithm is widely known and used for GPS, internet routing, etc. My favorite algorithm from the last two modules is probably Prim's algorithm. Something about finding the minimum spanning tree was just really fun for me to work through.

CST370 - Week 6

 For this week, we went over what makes an AVL tree, 2-3 trees, and heaps. Luckily most of this was familiar to me from my data structures class, as my biggest challenge this week was finding time to work on homework due to a busy holiday weekend at my job. Part 1 of the coding assignment had to do with "heapifying" a data set to maintain a max heap, or a heap where every parent is larger than both its children. The second part of this week's module had to do with hashing and how to handle collisions. We went over two strategies for handling collisions - "separate chaining" and "linear probing". For the coding assignment, we wrote a program that would take in user commands (for example, "insert 20") and hash/rehash the map as necessary. In the instance of a collision, it will simulate the steps of linear probing. I had a lot of fun with this assignment actually, even though I had to finish it in quite a rush. It was a good review of unordered_maps in C++ and I got a much more thorough understanding of how a rehashing works.

CST370 - Week 5

 This week we spent time covering tree traversals, the quicksort algorithm and topological ordering. When I first read up on Khan's algorithm, I expected it to be harder to understand, but I was glad to realize it was quick to pick up. The challenge for me came when writing the code to implement topological ordering. I had no problem with the basic implementation, but I had trouble when the input data contained two source nodes. I was eventually able to figure out my mistake and got the code working. Another challenge for me was the last question of the quiz that involved the King's puzzle. I realized that my ability to recognize a pattern and turn it into a mathematical formula was a little rusty. This is definitely something I should brush up on before the final exam.

CST370 - Week 4

 This week I spent the majority of time studying for the midterm. My main concern was finding and analyzing the recursive relation of certain algorithms, but I managed to do any and all practice problems and something finally clicked for me regarding that topic and it makes much more sense than it did originally.

Week 4 introduced the merge sort algorithm. While it can seem complicated at first it really is just one use of the divide and conquer strategy, where we break down the problem into smaller parts and then solve the more manageable parts before merging the pieces back together.

CST370 - Week 3

In this week's module, we covered brute force & exhaustive search, breadth-first search, depth-first search, and the master theorem. Brute force is a simple method of solving problems by just trying every possible outcome. For example, when considering the traveling salesman problem, just attempt all the possible paths and compare them to find which is the least cost. Breadth-first searches consider all the nodes at one level of a graph, before moving onto the next while depth-first searches involve following a path to its deepest point before coming back and checking other routes. Luckily, these were problems I'd practiced often in the path so I felt a little more confident with the material this week.

For the first part of the homework, we were to output a mark array after simulating a depth-first search. This part wasn't so bad to implement once I drew out the logic. The second part was a little more tricky to figure out. We needed to use permutations to solve the traveling salesman problem. I managed to pass all the available tests, but I feel the way that I stored the data and compared routes was a little.. messy.. to say the least. Hopefully, I will have time to review my code with the professor or the TA once it has been graded.