Leveling Up as a Programmer

I’ve noticed something these past couple days:

I am leveling up as a programmer.

My understanding of certain concepts is increasing. I talk about simpler concepts with clarity and authority.

Building the Random Quote Generator and having to Google everything and get feedback from different places helped me not only grok the simple and some intermediate stuff, it boosted my confidence as well. I wasn’t lacking for confidence, because if I was, I wouldn’t have approached the Pitt alum for that project that fell through. But I digress.

So while I was in my GitHub I went through my CS 0401 assignments repo that I had made private as requested by the professor (I am showcasing it now so I made it public again). I looked at the Bookcase project and instantly knew what I could have done better. For instance take this code:

Absolutely heinous.

I should not have named the constructor the same as the class. The constructor is a type in the Java namespace and the method is a different part of the Java naming convention altogether. It also isn’t allowed because I used public Bookstore() instead of public void Bookstore() which the void return type means it will not return a value. However if you look at it, I am expecting the constructor to return a value because I omitted the void return type. You cannot call a constructor with the same name as a class with it returning a value. That’s not how Java works.

I also didn’t call the methods I created inside of main. I don’t know why, but I didn’t finish it so maybe that has something to do with it. I think I did finish it but didn’t get it to run.

I’ve noticed something these past couple days:

I am leveling up as a programmer.

My understanding of certain concepts is increasing. I talk about simpler concepts with clarity and authority.

Building the Random Quote Generator and having to Google everything and get feedback from different places helped me not only grok the simple and some intermediate stuff, it boosted my confidence as well. I wasn’t lacking for confidence, because if I was, I wouldn’t have approached the Pitt alum for that project that fell through. But I digress.

So while I was in my GitHub I went through my CS 0401 assignments repo that I had made private as requested by the professor (I am showcasing it now so I made it public again). I looked at the Bookcase project and instantly knew what I could have done better. For instance take this code:

Absolutely heinous.

I should not have named the constructor the same as the class. The constructor is a type in the Java namespace and the method is a different part of the Java naming convention altogether. It also isn’t allowed because I used public Bookstore() instead of public void Bookstore() which the void return type means it will not return a value. However if you look at it, I am expecting the constructor to return a value because I omitted the void return type. You cannot call a constructor with the same name as a class with it returning a value. That’s not how Java works.

I also didn’t call the methods I created inside of main. I don’t know why, but I didn’t finish it so maybe that has something to do with it. I think I did finish it but didn’t get it to run.

I still have a long way to go. I am warming up to Java as JavaScript’s ES6 syntax mimics a lot of the OOP naming conventions in Java which makes switching back and forth between them as an intermediate programmer easy enough, even though JavaScript isn’t technically OOP and the class keyword isn’t the same as in Java. I am really excited right now. I am growing and it feels good after a year and a half of learning.