Khiem's CS Journey

 Week 11 - CST338 This past week introduced me to IntelliJ and Java, which was a noticeable shift coming from languages like Python, JS, and Go. I'd say the biggest challenge was getting comfortable with IntelliJ itself. It's VERY similar to VSCode; however, there're just some things and extensions that I'm not used to. I personally don't autofill my code often. Java is also very strict with capitalization as well, which autocomplete helps with; however, it still takes some time to get used to. Java is very resource easy so I see why a lot of app devs use it. There's full on databases full on Java out there. It's a relatively simple language, just syntax of course kills us all.

When solving the CodingBat challenges, I mostly looked at the examples given and tried to figure out the pattern before writing code. For the String problems like countHi and countCode, I realized pretty quickly that I needed to loop through the string and grab substrings of a fixed length to check for matches. That approach worked well across multiple problems so I reused it. For the most part I threw code at it first and adjusted when it didn't work. The Map problems were more straightforward since it was mostly just checking if a key existed and then putting or removing values. Those I was able to get on the first try by just reading the instructions carefully. What didn't work at first was the Functional problems like doubling and square. The logic itself was right using stream and map, but the editor kept stripping the method signature which caused compile errors. It took a couple tries to figure out that I needed to paste the full method including the signature, not jus...