CodeClan Week 11

The first week in the new year saw us beginning our training with Java. I have used Java before during my degree to do a number of projects, up to and including an accurate Newtonian model of the Solar System. We had used the Emacs editor on the university’s Linux systems, so I had an idea of what to expect. By the end of the Monday I had been very pleasantly surprised. Jet Brains’ IntelliJ editor is the most helpful development environment I have used yet, even better than their Pycharm environment I used to do some Python work before the start of the CodeClan course. In addition to the improvements afforded to us by the editor, Java coming on the heels of JavaScript helped to enhance its appeal in my eyes. The structure of Java meant that it was quite straight forward to use and - at least in my opinion - allowed for a greater focus on the actual logic of a problem rather than the different layers of syntax.

Later in the week the concept of Enums was introduced. If I had met these before I don’t remember it. The usefulness of them was immediately apparent, especially when working on a large codebase. The ability to have fixed values rather than relying on entering strings each time a value is called for reduces the scope for error dramatically. Thursday night we had the opportunity to volunteer for CoderDojo, acting as mentors for 8 and 9 year olds learning the basics of coding. This was an interesting and rewarding experience, watching the children developing an intuitive feel for the logical structures of programming.

We finished the week with the test for the PDA (Professional Development Award), which turned out to be much easier than expected. Our weekend homework was a return to the early homework from JavaScript and Ruby: to model an airport with passengers, aircraft, flights, and all the functions required for the interrelations between these objects. It was an exercise in TDD (Test Driven Development) with a sad lack of front end. However working on the logic has been fun, and I’m looking forward to next week with the hope that we’ll see the start of attaching Java to some front end code.