What did you do this past week? This week we read papers on What Should We Teach and the Joel Test. What Should Teach discussed the importance of schools teaching practical programming and The Joel Test contains a list of twelve practices that every successful software development team should have. In class we went over the fifth project, Life, which involves implementing Conway’s game of Life, Fredkin’s game of Life, and a handler class to allow a mix of the cells from each. We also discussed an example of a shape class and a circle that extends it as an example of various object oriented programming concepts. Finally my partner and I began work on the Life project. This weekend I went to Music Hacks and built an mobile game where you try and recreate songs for other people to guess using random sound effects.

What’s in your way? I did alright on the quizzes this week but I need to continue to study to do even better. I have a lot going on this time of the year so I need to find time for completing the fifth project by this Thursday and Studding for the final test. I have three exams and Two tests in a span of three days during the last week of classes so I really need to focus on getting ahead on studding and completing things.

What will you do next week? This week I will finish the Life project and read papers called A Woman’s Place and Terrible Female Engineers. In class we will discus Method Overriding.

What’s my experience of the class? So far the fifth project seems straight forward and clear in direction. We have spend a lot of time talking about the Vector and Shape examples but I think they are really helpful for seeing slightly larger applications of some of these concepts.

What’s my pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? I had a discussion with a friend this week about time management techniques. Personally what I find successful is to plan out what I need and want to do far in advance, estimate how long everything will take, prioritize what needs to get done, and access how successful I was for future reference. I tend to get off task fairly easily so I use an app called Brain Focus that times out alternating intervals of 25 minutes of working and 5 minutes of break and then longer breaks after 4 working intervals. I find this really helps me stay on task and manage my time better.