Problem Solving Attitudes

• Self-awareness
• Calm
• Determination

Always know how you feel. This is critical. If you know you’re frustrated, that could be a key indicator that it’s time to go take a shower.

Keep in mind that you will understand the problem. Work backwards from that certainty.

Don’t let uncertainty overwhelm you or lessen your determination. Focus on the certainty you do have.

Talk it out.

Problem Solving Strategies

Go in the Right Direction

• Make sure you know what problem you’re trying to solve. Articulate it clearly. This is harder than it sounds.
• Make sure you know what you think you know. Test what you think you know to confirm it. Build from there.
• Keep your goals in mind. Sometimes you’ll discover you’re off on a tangent. Re-focus.

Work smart * Start early. * Make lists of what you need to accomplish. I use Google Keep. Separate the planning from the doing to keep your mind clear. * Break the problem down into solvable pieces. At least one solveable piece will keep you moving forward. Once you’ve solved a piece, save/commit your work and take a breather. * Time box. Work no more than 15-25 minutes at a time on a single problem. * Stumped? Stop and come back later. In the shower is where many a tough programming problem has been solved.

Use Your Resources * Who would know the answer? Find them, in person or via Google. * Re-read the relevant parts in our textbook or the other resources I linked to in our syllabus. * Know what to google for. Much of the help on the internet (e.g. StackOverflow) is too specific for the basics. Use a trusted reference when you can, be that a person or a book.

Problem Solving Tactics For Python

• print what you think things should be and see if they are
• see if you can predict what kind of Errors you’ll generate
• try and except errors you don’t care about for now
• Comment out (Ctrl-/ on Trinket) as much code as you can to isolate the problem

TurtleHacks

Nice use of Goto:

Hello world! Doing this the hard way is a great way to learn:

Simple but effective:

Very well commented:

Checkers!

Sup, robot?

Great design:

Very creative:

Using some Functions, which we’ll learn about soon:

Baking a custom cake:

Preview of how our lives will get better: Using some loops!

On Reflections

Here’s an outstanding reflection. Jasmine really gave me a sense of her journey. But more importantly, she went on that journey. As a graduate level class, I’m puting the onus on you to drive your own learning.

Here’s another good refelction.

Our Reading

Did you do it?

Github Review & Opening Issues

To maintain the quality of our site, we’re going to help police each others’ work. We’ll use Github Issues to do this, just like open source projects do.

Find a partner. On the people page the partner should have:

• First Post
  • Should have a well-formatted title
  • Should display the author’s github name
  • Should be formatted like a post
• Turtlehacks Post
  • Should have a well-formatted title
  • Should display the author’s github name
  • Should be formatted like a post

Go to our class repo’s Pull Requests tab. Filter by your partner’s name. Their Exercises Pull request: - Should have a well-formatted pull request title - Should have well-formatted YAML header with the correct author (their github name) and layout: post - Should include three trinkets - Should be in a file that’s in their subfolder, titled correctly.

Note: If you can’t find their post on the people page, there’s likely something wrong with their author: metadata field. Look on the main posts page for the post.

If any of these things are missing, Open an Issue, no more than one issue per assignment. Title it intelligibly, something like “@classmate’s Turtle post title needs spaces”. If there are multiple issues, you can be broader, like “Formatting issues with @classmate’s Turtle post”. In the issue, list the things that are missing. You can make checkboxes if needed like this:

- [ ] A checkbox item

Be helpful and let your partner know some details of how to fix the error. Here’s one I did recently that a student fixed.

@mention your partner on the issue. Once you all have commit access we’ll assign issues.

Handling Issues Assigned to You

If your partner found an issue, no worries! You have all the tools you need to fix it. Using the class notes, how-to sections and/or assignments, fix the issue via a pull request. In your pull request title or description, include the phrase “Fixes XX”, where XX is the number of the issue. This will create a link between your PR and the issue AND when the PR gets merged it will automatically close the issue. Neat!

In the beginning, issues won’t count against you. We’re still gettting the hang of things. If you have open issues from me or a classmate, learn why they happened and next time make sure to doublecheck those specific things. A large part of being successful in programming is paying attention to details, which often just means slowing down and/or using internal checkists for yourself.

But as the semester goes on, just like in a professional setting, creating extra work for your peers by doing low quality work will start to negatively impact my assessement of your work. So think of these first issues as FYIs of the things you’re still learning. Soon you’ll be expected to get all of this right every time so that we can focus on the content of your posts.

Github Questions

What’s a commit?

• A set of line-by-line changes to one or more files in a git repository

What’s a branch?

• A version of your source code. More precisely, it’s a sequnce of *commits that leads to the branch’s current state.

What’s the gh-pages branch?

• Where Github looks to automatically build a site

What’s a Pull Request?

• A social wrapper around the comparison between two branches designed to prepare for merging changes

What’s a Merge?

• A process of incorporating the commits from one branch into another. Usually done from a Pull Request but also doable from the command line.

What’s a merge conflict?

• When two or more commits specify changes to a single line of a file. These changes can’t be automatically integrated without potentially using work, so humans need to specify what should happen.

Fix Issues (~10 minutes)

A little in-class time to fix any outstanding issues.