Week 2
Fancy Topics
This week was definitely a challenge for me since I went through a lot of concepts that I didn’t know or at least didn’t understand until now. Object-Oriented programming was key for this week’s homework but methods were also required to be used in order to accomplish what was assigned.
Object-Oriented programming, as said before, was key to getting things done through this week. I’ve learned a lot about certain tools Java has and how IntelliJ is pretty cool to code in when you are using Java. Installing API’s and plugins for my pom was not much of a challenge since I thought it was something with my laptop but at the end of the day, I think it was part of the assignment. As for the assignment, we had to develop a class for this test in which we get through some arrays to arrange data from a movies.txt (In which you could see it was a big data txt of movie reviews) and then process it so it prints some recommendations for a certain user.
I don’t think I've been more active in a single problem than this time. My brain feels heavy and dry and I could use some sleep. Navigating through the assignment, I realized that I had to use hashes instead of just a regular Array because I had to have this certain key and this certain value. So, I opted to use Hash Sets because I had to have no repeated UserIds and HashSet property makes it so keys are not repeated. Then I've got to realize that I actually had to use a HashMap in both ways so I could call the buffer writer to write in my .csv or at least that’s how I pictured it. So far, I had all my tests going through successfully but the last test of the recommendations part was wrong. My .csv was giving me null values for a certain key and that made me focus on my logic statements. After some hard work and focus I got to see that my problem was in how I used my buffer writer... I was using it in the wrong order in which my .csv had to be filed so I just grabbed the pieces that my buffer writer was going to write and then called it in a function so it makes sure that it is in the right order.
I think that if I knew beforehand about Hash’s, IntelliJ, Java and how to google my doubts, my assignment would’ve been done by Thursday. This kind of project will make sure you either learn or fail and I'm happy to say that I learned a lot of concepts that only by trial-and-error you learn.