The second week of Software Engineering started to pick up a bit as we were introduced to our first project. I thought how Professor Downing went over the major components of the project each class day was really useful in digesting all the requirements introduced in the project specification. I like how the simple problem we were given still has many components to it that make the entire project interesting. Although I have not gotten the chance to really start working on the meat of project, I think having a roadmap in my head will really help. I do wish I had started thinking about Collatz before class on Monday just to get a chance to figure out some of the things for myself, but I’m sure there will still be plenty of challenges to work on.

Another thing we started this week was regular readings and daily quizzes. The readings were pretty interesting, but I felt that just reading the chapters was not enough for me to remember some of the details for the quizzes. I should work on reading more critically and processing the information presented instead of merely skimming the words. I do tend to freak out while taking the quizzes, so that might be part of the issue.

For the tip of the week, Learn X in Y minutes is a really useful site for learning the basic syntax and some of the quirks of different languages. I use it both as an introduction to new languages and a review for a language I need to brush up on.