This past week in my classes have been good- busy, but good! I’ve really felt myself getting back to my school-time routine.

Communications

In my communications class, we focused on taking a case study, and creating an email appropriate for the situation. The main takeaway for me was that there really isn’t a need to include a lot of small talk or niceties in a business email. I specifically tried to focus on including my expectations in the email. This is something I’ve been working on in my real-life communications as well: laying out your expectations explicitly means that there’s no room for misinterpretation on either part, and that a true negotiation can take place, if necessary.

We completed our assignment in groups. Now, usually, I’m not a huge fan of group work- especially with remote learning! A lot of time can be spent just making sure everyone works together fairly well [or well enough!] But I was paired up with someone I had already worked with, and we managed to finish the assignment in roughly half the time allowed!

Java

I was excited to see that we were finally starting to learn about design patterns this week! Design patterns are something I’ve been hearing about for a while now, but haven’t had a lot of time to look into. There’s a good introduction from Source Making, and Geeks for Geeks has multiple articles that makes use of charts to really flesh out their examples.

There seems to be some debate about the use of design patterns. As a person who is quite new to them, I can see both sides, but I’m sure I’ll have a strong feeling one way or the other as I become more familiar with them.

I think that, as usual, I’m really going to start understanding design patterns best as I apply them. Saying that, I’m really looking forward to using them! I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to see instances when I can apply them as I create programs, and that somehow makes me feel like less of a newbie??