A-cheese-ment

The profs have a sense of humour. That's good. It's a necessary tool in life, in my opinion.

This was an amusing week. Busy and enlightening, too.

More recursion was on the plate for the lab, and our instructor suggested we "trace" our code as we went. Basically, take down the simplest form and then add levels of complexity. Such brilliance.

It may not work for everyone, but tracing works fantastically for me. Seeing how the code is "built" has always been helpful (I'm a visual learner, as humankind likes to compartmentalize nowadays), but actually going through from simple to complex is brilliant. It made such a difference when puzzling out the code (lo, we did puzzle out that code!)

The pain of computer science often lies in the discovery of the tiny error that made you waste half an hour when all it required was more care. I used to make mistakes like that in math class, where one small problem (forgot to change the sign when moving something over, usually) made me burn in hell for eternity.

We had that sort of thing during the lab. Thankfully, it was resolved before we called it a night, but still, not fun.

In other news, I appreciated the experience of sitting front and centre in lecture - it is great for paying attention. And A1 is surprisingly easy once you parse all the pieces out and make sense of it all.

Ultimately, 'twas a week of good cheer and good learning. I understand all the more the value of being a careful programmer and working with visual aids. It doesn't require a full map of every assignment and value, but just drawing out what you're trying to do is a huge help.