#weeklyprojects

Code Patterns

Stop rewriting code you wrote before. Stop fixing bugs that you debugged before. Reuse code whenever you can. Copy and paste.

Would building a library of coding tools make me more competitive in coding competitions? The answer must be yes, since it can't possibly make me less competitive, right?

Linked Lists

Linked lists are extremely common. You could imagine them as the slime monsters of the coding world. I'll be farming some LeetCode style slimes for the next couple of days.

Copy LeetCode's linked list class in c++ and implement/demonstrate a simple print method for linked lists.

Finish all LeetCode linked list problems.

Implement rest of basic linked list methods (i.e. length, head, tail, copy, etc.). Include time and space complexity. Write both iterative and recursive solutions if available.

Stacks and queues.

Select and implement 2 LeetCode problems as cleanly as possible.

Sort.

Update: Admit it

I didn't complete the milestones that I set out to complete. No matter what excuses I may have, none will change that fact. While I could try my hardest to redeem myself, I would just be ignoring the true underlying problem.

Alright, what in the world prevented me from completing my milestones?

Milestone difficulty? The milestones are supposed to be easy and they are. I'm confident that I could complete the milestones one way or another, but the way I embarked on lacked the quality and flexibility I wanted. It was dirty on the outside and ugly on the inside, but it worked. I everntually caved and stopped working on milestones to bring up the quality. Now I have a system with unnecessarily good quality under the hood, which will help me in the future if I continue to use this system. But why did quality suffer while I was completing milestones in the first place?

Unfamiliar libraries and frameworks? Okay, I admit that unfamiliar libraries and frameworks did pose problems and probably alway will. With new tools, it's not always straight forward to find out what are the best or standard ways to use them, which will inevitably lead to degraded quality.

From here, I will work with the assumption that integrating new, unfamiliar tools is the root cause that prevented me from completing my milestones. Testing this hypothesis would involve completing milestones only with tools I'm very familiar with. While I can avoid new tools, the potential value of any future projects will suffer, since many projects rely on the value from preexisting tools. With projects of value in mind, I need to develop a tool learning process in order to gracefully integrate them into my projects. As for the projects themselves, I need to find projects where I can guarantee the highest quality.