Skip to main content

Busy boy!


By the gods themselves I have been a busy boy lately!

The teaching has been going well. I have been teaching A2 Computer Science at a nearby 6th form college now for coming up to 3 weeks. It has been quite tough in that I have had to relearn things I thought I would never have to know again and some of the things covered in it I don't think I ever did cover.

Up till now I have just covered abstraction, interfaces and Algorithms and how to measure them (Big O Notation and things like that). I was quite nervous about teaching some of the content as I am not very confident with my maths. However the kids on the course are very switched on which takes the heat off me a little bit. The official book for the course is this. In general I wouldn't recommend the book. It over complicates things and uses fairly poor examples. It also has some of the nastiest psuedo code I have seen. They should have just gone for machine code it would have been more readable!

Apart from the teaching I have been quite bogged down with a fairly sizeable VBA project which has begun to bore me as I have been stopping and starting it for 3 months now. It has been counted as one of the less critical jobs to do so whenever we run out of time in the monthly iteration it gets pushed back. The problem is there is a certain amount of time wasted getting back into the groove of a project that you had top drop tools on 3 weeks ago.

In addition to that I am just starting my Msc in Intelligent Systems @ DMU. I have decided to just take one module per semester at the moment becuase of the tight schedule ect.. I think this will help me as well when it comes to some of the fuzzy logic problems ect.. I don't have a problem with the concept of it really but some of the notation in it gives me a nosebleed!!

The thing that upsets me most is that although I have started the Msc and I finally have an excuse for the Lego Nxt Robot AND a new Lego Nxt has just come out!!!! I am so financially stretched at the moment that I simply can not afford it. I am hoping that after Christmas (Or maybe for Christmas Leanne......) the Robot will come to me.
Labels:

Comments

HrlD said…
You should have put more about how switched on your students are. Also, do you have a link to the junior programmer exams?
30 December 2009 at 13:59
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating star ratings in HTML and Javascript

I'd searched around a little for some shortcuts to help in doing this but I couldn't find anything satisfactory that included the ability to pull the rating off again for saving. I'd ended up coming up with this rather cheeky solution. Hopefully it helps you too! This is my first post in a while (I stopped blogging properly about 8 years ago!) It's strange coming back to it. Blogger feels very crusty and old by todays standards too.
Post a Comment
Read more

Make your objects immutable by default

More about the Good Dojo In my post last week , I discussed creating objects that are instantiated safely. Please go back and read if you are interested. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I'd also written the class so it was immutable when instantiated. This is important!!! I feel like a broken record in repeating this but I am sure at the time of writing your code, you aren't modifying your object all over the place and so are safe in the belief that protecting against mutability is overkill. Please remember though, your code could be around for a hell of a long time. You aren't writing your code for now... you are writing for the next fool that comes along (including you) . Nothing is more upsetting that coming back to fix a bug on some wonderfully crafted code to say "Who has butchered my code?!", but often you were involved at the start of the process. You made the code easy to modify, allowing objects to be used / reused / modified without thi
Post a Comment
Read more

An instantiated object should be "ok"

I've been QA'ing quite a bit of work recently and one common theme I've noticed across both Java and C# projects I have been looking at is that we occasionally open ourselves up unessacarily to Exceptions by the way objects are being created. My general rule of thumb (which I have seen mentioned in a Pluralsight video recently but also always re-iterate in various Robust Software talks I have done) is that you shouldn't be able to create an object and then call a method or access a property that then throws an exception. At worst, it should return null (I'm not going to moan about that now). I've created an example below. We have two Dojos, one is good and one is bad. The bad dojo looks very familiar though. It's a little class written in the style that seems often encouraged. In fact, many classes start life as something like this. Then as years go on, you and other colleagues add more features to the class and it's instantiation becomes a second
Post a Comment
Read more