Voyages of a Software Dev Intern Thru The Early Years

I don't think I'll be posting about every diagram I do--they're not great works of art the world must see, and if you really wanna see them they'll be in the Github repo. But I did want to post something project specific for each piece of theory here. Thus, please see below. I think this is pretty self explanatory, even to the uninitiated. Black dot with no ring is the start point, black dot with a ring is the end of the use case. In this case, we can end the use case by just...stopping, or by going on to the "create course" use case. Which will be a diagram I can link to, hence that weird symbol after the Create Course block. As an aside, I'm using a program called Violet to do my diagrams, and have been for about a year now. It may not be as fancy as Visio or several online subscription options, but I'm honestly more interested in being able to get something on paper (so to speak) quickly, so I can start messing with it. I need to understand...

So I've got use cases figured out. Not all of them--only a fool or a genius thinks he can sit at a desk away from the end user and think he's got all the use cases figured out (and a genius would never truly believe it). But you can't sit around trying to anticipate every possible use case before you start, so once we have enough to cobble together a complete program or part of one we can move on for a bit. Side note, this is the beauty of the agile approach: "Yeah, we know we gotta go to the moon. But we have to do it in 10 years, so we can't spend 5 years thinking up every problem we might need to solve before we start solving them. How about we start with 'design a rocket that reaches orbit without killing anyone' and build on that when we finish?" That's called an iteration, but more on that later. Fleshing out what that use case needs is the next step, and there are a couple tools I remember being taught. One of them is the activity diagra...

So last time we covered the really high level theory behind use cases and why planning them is kind of important when writing a program. This is the part where I tell you I've changed my mind, I'm just going to totally wing this project since I landed an internship and I don't actually need this program to be professional looking. PSYCH--did you even read how I closed the last post? That was hilarious. But anyway. I didn't actually go through the full CSCI-1275 "discovering your use cases through '20 Questions,' rune reading, and chasing clients for interviews" approach. We spent close to a month on use cases in that class--how to identify them, how to define them, how to model them, and a little on how to prioritize them. The bulk of the class was use cases, and like I said...I get it now. But that doesn't mean I'm doing to sit and actually write out a full CRUD technique analysis of all the ways a single user will interact with a ...

They told me in my CSCI-1275 Systems Analysis and Design course there's a tendency for programmers to just start coding stuff without thinking, and this was nigh on tantamount to total catastrophe. I didn't fully understand this until a little later in the semester. We had just learned about arrays and collections in my CSCI-1630 C# Programming I course, and I found this to be a perfect excuse to write a little application that would synthetically divide polynomials . (That's a really great way to master synthetic division, actually, if you're interested in brushing up on that skill. Although my wife still insists the time would have been better spent putting more time into my algebra homework. Two types of people...). At any rate, long story short: I made the program work perfectly, for 3rd degree polynomials that divided evenly. Then I realized it broke when I tried a polynomial of the 4th degree. And then again when the 3rd degree polynomial had a remainder. ...