Notes
This week, we went over quite a few different tools that I think will be useful for us in the future. A concept from this week of class that finally clicked for me was unit testing. I’ve seen it some cases before but never really understood the use case for it until now. I can see how it’s useful for testing specific functionalities within our own programs, but not so much for testing other people’s code. The collaborative quizzes were quite useful because we got to talk through certain concepts and make sure we understood them fully. I enjoyed them!
I think the programming challenge was too simple this week, so it didn’t fully test our ability to think under pressure. I do think that the platform was pretty nice though! The assigned paper taught me better how to read makefiles. I’ve seen them in previous classes so I’ve gotten decent at understanding them, but being able to see other comments from classmates helped me deepen my understanding and ask questions I may not have otherwise.
This week, a moment of discovery that stood out to me was the idea of coverage. At work in the past or even online, I had seen people mention code coverage but not really understood what it meant. The percentages finally make sense to me now! I get why people say you need >90% code coverage all the time. I used to think it meant checking every single function in your code, but instead it’s about writing good test cases that check all lines of your functions.
A tip of the week I have for this week is using an autoformatter in VS Code. It’s something I’ve been using for some time now, and I think it makes life a lot easier. I always forget to run things like linters if working in a big codebase and setting up an automatic format option on save makes it super easy to make sure you’re adhering to guidelines in a bigger codebase. I also think it’s nice to be able to work without worrying about understanding different styles.