Week 1 Java and Coding Bat

This week was quite interesting. I decided to start from scratch with Java by reviewing as much as I can from recent lecture videos, books provided by O'reilly Tech Books, and YouTube tutorial videos from thenewboston; Although those videos were outdated, they still refreshed my memory of when I first became familiarized with Java. 

An important task this week was to tackle the Coding Bat code practice problems for Java. My only recent experience with coding problems involved mostly with C++, so in this particular situation I had to readjust to Java's syntax. The process in which I used to solve the Coding Bat challenges were to first brute force the problems to see if I could get any test cases correct. If I did get some of the tests correct, I would analyze the failed ones and compare them to the expected outputs. In most of the problems I managed to get them in one try, but some required a multitude of attempts to pass all the test cases successfully. If there was confusion on the syntax or logic of the problem, I would simply look through the Coding Bat help section to re-read material or watch the videos. In addition, I had to refresh my memory with certain methods such as those associated with strings by looking them up on W3schools. A good majority of the problems such as array's and those engaging with loop iterations made me use Paint software in order to visualize the indexes. Another method I used to tackle the problems were to produce pseudo-code in a notepad and then attempt it in Java syntax in a separate IDE. My main struggle with this assignment were definitely involved with the String-2 section, where it consisted of problems requiring iterations of strings with loops in order to compare sub-strings of two strings or manipulate the strings in various ways. One of the problems such as String-2's repeatSeparator demonstrated that my brute-force technique did not work in that circumstance and it drove me to compile it about 30 different times. The brute-force worked for all of the other problems except for that one. Furthermore, I was barely familiarized with maps and functionals such as those utilizing lambdas. Exposure to those problems were a new experience and frankly I actually learned a lot about them, especially utilizing the replaceAll method since most of the questions involved that. Overall, the Coding Bat challenges are quite fun and earning stars really hits that dopamine. I am hoping to do more of these in the future, and I am really excited for the weeks to come!