Week 14 - Learning Journal (CST338)

1. Who did you work with on this review, and how did the collaboration actually go?
I worked with David Renteria. The collaboration went well, but it was not constant. We checked in at different points to compare ideas and make sure our logic aligned.

If your team was hard to reach, how did you handle it — and what would you do differently next time?
There were times he was hard to reach. I kept working instead of waiting and saved questions for later. Next time, I would set clear checkpoints so we stay aligned.

2. Walk through how you approached the Markov assignment from the moment you first read it. What did you do before you wrote your first line of code?
I focused on understanding the problem first. I saw it as mapping each word to possible next words. I planned to use a HashMap and thought about handling sentence starts and punctuation before coding.

Looking back, at what point did you feel most lost or stuck — and what got you moving again?
I got stuck on handling sentence endings. I fixed it by adding a special start key and simplifying the logic.

3. How did your classmates approach the same problem? Pick at least one difference between their strategy and yours and try to explain why you think they went that direction.
Some classmates cleaned the text first by removing punctuation early. I handled punctuation during execution. They likely wanted simpler logic later, while I focused on flow.

Did hearing their approach change how you understand the problem itself, even a little?
Yes. It showed me that preprocessing can simplify the overall design.

4. If you were starting the Markov assignment over today, what is the one thing you would do differently — and what specifically made you realize that?
I would separate parsing, mapping, and generation more clearly. I realized this while debugging because the code was harder to follow.

Is that change about how you think through problems, how you organize your work, or something else?
It is about organizing my work better, not changing how I think.

5. Ask a classmate to look at your code against the Google Java Style Guide. What did they flag, and do you agree with their reading of the style guide?
They flagged spacing, line length, and formatting issues. I agree since the code works but is not very clean.

After seeing the peer feedback, does automating style feel like a shortcut or a useful habit? Why?
It feels like a useful habit. It keeps code consistent and saves time so I can focus on logic.