Scattered thoughts:<\/p>\n
A course on learning a programming language will help answer the question, “how do I do X?” The fun thing about an algorithms course is that the question is “how do I do X within certain parameters of time and space?” <\/p>\n
In the real world, the two questions are actually one and the same. I’ve just come away from a project that had serious scalability problems, because many of its features could handle only very small sets of data used in development; when the app was run against live data, things stopped working because they would hit a timeout limit or processes would run out of memory.<\/p>\n
I’m learning quickly that I can often intuit the “shape” of how an algorithm will perform, and I now have better language for describing this, but I’m not so good at calculating precisely the order of growth for even slightly complex code. It’s hard!<\/p>\n
One paranoia-inducing aspect of programming assignments: for week 4’s assignment, a single timing test (1 out of 17) failed for my code because it took too long to finish. It’s hard to figure out… does this single failure expose a flaw in my overall implementation (if so, why did the other 16 pass)? Or was this last test thrown in as a “bonus” involving a difficult set of inputs that would require further optimization if you wanted to get full points? This is a tricky thing to assess as a student, and something only a human being would be able to tell you.<\/p>\n
Trees are truly magical. I feel like I’ve barely started to grasp their many applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Scattered thoughts: A course on learning a programming language will help answer the question, “how do I do X?” The fun thing about an algorithms course is that the question is “how do I do X within certain parameters of time and space?” In the real world, the two questions are actually one and the … Continue reading “Algorithms I: Notes in Week 5”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,14,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-compsci","category-java","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=777"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":785,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}