Only 3 weeks left in this my first semester back. After this I only have 2 classes left to have my BSCS (a math and a physics) which I began in 1980. I was this close 20 years ago (after leaving campus, working for a while then going back to school the first time). But life, work got in my way and I quit with only 2 classes left. 20 years later a couple of requirements changed and caused me to have to take 2 additional classes. Not too bad really.
But now I’m giving serious thought to continuing on to grad school. I’ll take the time over the holiday break to decide but I know I’d enjoy it. I have the time. So why not? When I was last working my peers all had graduate degrees where as I didn’t even have my BS (even though I only lacked a single CS course, which this OOP class is taking care of). Even though I held my own just fine next to them (thank you very much) and, I never would have admitted it but, I think I sometimes was maybe a 1/2 a step behind them.
So it’d be cool to get a grad degree. Plus, I still really enjoy programming and computer science after ~30 years of it. Of course I don’t have to go to school to continue learning. Easy enough to get the books and just learn it. One has to do that anyway. I recently acquired a copy of Knuth for the first time. But, it’s fun being on campus, the course experience and why not get the cert. Still it’s a lot of work so I’ll have to take a hard look and see if it’s what I want to do. My experience being back in school this semester leads me to conclude that I would enjoy it. I remember being a young undergrad. All the time I was studying then it felt like it was a chore. Something that I wanted to get done with and be able to get on to better things. Now, school is one of the better things. Funny how things change.
Seeing the extra 20 pts from the Darwin project sinks it in even further just how much extra credit there is available in this class. 70 points on the projects plus 20 more for blogs 90/1000 = 9% basically a whole letter grade. That’s cool. What’s cool about it is that it puts the projects on equal weighting with the exams. But notice what most of the extra credit is for: pair programming. Interesting.
My grade is important to me. Not only is it a matter of pride but also my gpa needs all the help I can get it now that I’m looking at grad school. (I wasn’t a great student when young. Thought I knew everything and plus partying was much more important than grades). I’ve seen in some a lack of desire to do that little bit extra to try and get full credit on the projects. That just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s worth it to me to spend an extra couple of hours adding more unit tests, a few extra paragraphs of wiki, or what ever to get full credit. Getting full credit on the projects is like low hanging fruit. It’s there just grab it. But that’s me. If I were taking a full load I’d probably feel differently. But the point I’d make here is that I learned early on how true professionals distinguished themselves. One very distinguishing characteristic is going the extra mile, or 10 miles if necessary to carry an answer to a question or a task to it’s logical conclusion. Tenacity. I picked up on that early in my career and it stuck with me in all parts of my life.
I figured out that for the last few weeks I’m going to practice writing little code snippets without the aid of the compiler, like on exams. I found that on the exams I tend to make mistakes that would be caught by the compiler, or a unit test. I suspect that I’ve grown used to that after working and not taking exams. Consequently I don’t necessarily try very hard to type in code without errors. Anyway, I will be practicing that and hopefully I can improve a little. My idea is to try and get the code perfect by eye balling it, then go to the compiler and see.
I have most of the code I’ve ever worked on even as far back as the 80s and even some of the classes I took then. I recently stumbled on the code/projects from my compilers class cs375 in the late 80s. It was Mr Mok’s class. We wrote a (simple) pascal compiler in C. I see the lexer, parser, tokenizer, etc. I vaguely remember doing it. I sometimes find myself referring to old code to remember how to do something like make a certain api call or what ever. Not that I’ve ever referred to that pascal compiler. But it’s kinda cool to have it and be able to look at what I did a long time ago. I like all the examples we’ve been handed in this class. We’ve learned so many subtle nuances of C++ so I’m glad to have the examples to refer to later. Might come in handy. I doubt you can find a book with all these issues gathered in one place.