Tuesday, September 30, 2014

MakerSquare Day 24: Time--important for traveling salesmen and sleepers (6/1)

This is the beginning of our sixth week, the last week before we move from the junior side to the senior side. Which is both a philosophical shift--from learning programming languages to planning our projects--and a real physical shift, since MakerSquare has two offices, one of which is the HQ for the younger cohort (when they have overlapping cohorts). Which means we have to get in as much ping pong time as we can.

And "time" is on my mind (yes it is), both because we spent part of today thinking about how fast/slow a recursive Fibonacci program would be (answer: much slower than an iterative version--unless you use cache-ing); and because I was up until 1am on Sunday night working out a working draft of my traveling salesman algorithm--the algorithm that beat me on Thursday.

It took a fair amount of time; and then, after I finished (closer to 1:30am) and had a chat with my night-owl housemate, I was a little too energized to fall asleep. Which is why I only had four hours of sleep on Sunday night and spent Monday in that low-sleep-dep fugue.

Still, as much trouble as I have building a traveling salesman algorithm, I love me some abstract data structures--like queues, stacks, and singly/doubly linked lists, which is what rounded out the day.

No, wait: what really rounded out the day was a meeting with my mentor where we discussed writing clear code, which gives me lots of ideas for making comments and clarifying my traveling salesman... tomorrow.

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