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Episode III: Revenge of the SLOG

"Programming is easy" said no one ever. Actually, I just made that up, but maybe some people do find it relatively easy. The hardest part is everything sounds good on paper (or screen in this case). Everything should work, but sometimes it just doesn't. I've had times like this, where I just stare at an error for hours on end and have no idea what to make of it. Turns out I forgot a semi-colon. Nothing's easy at first, but even a thousand-mile journey starts with a single step. Lao Tzu said something like that, I bet he could've been a super cool programmer. Anyways in order to understand how to program, how to design a function; one must BE the function, FEEL the function, FLOW with the function. Function is teacher, mother, and secret lover. It's a good idea to start with what exactly you want the function to do. What is the purpose of this function? Give it an existential crisis. Generally, useful functions have inputs and outputs. The output is alw
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Episode II: Attack of the SLOGs

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I prepare for the quizzes by reviewing the notes I've made in class, and doing the weekly practices. For the midterm, I did the same thing, including practicing with the past midterms. So far this strategy is effective, as I am quite satisfied with my midterm and quiz marks. I honestly think this course is more practical than conceptual- the more practice problems you do, the better you will understand. There were a couple of images that I've made, which I found really cool. One of them is the Sierpinski triangle, I just really love the recursive element. Continuing with the recursive theme, I messed around with some other expressions, and managed to get some pretty neat recursive images. So in this example, pretty simple yet cool use of recursion. I got this cloning function which also scales the image down at each interval (kind of gives it the illusion of distance...).  Anyways, so far nothing in the course felt too intimidating, although recursion was a bit confu
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Episode I: The Phantom SLOG

I chose CSC104 because of a few reasons. Personally, I've always wanted to take a computer course- I had some experience with programming back in high school, so I've decided to put those years into use. Plus, I find programming to be very fun! It's like an open canvas, but instead I can code for anything I want. Practically, I believe that understanding computational thinking is very important in today's world, where technology and computers are so prevalent. It should be part of the standard curriculum at this point. I've always imagined programming to be very difficult, but then again, what isn't? When I started my programming class in high school, we used java. That's when I realized that programming has a lot of trials and errors, I didn't know anything at the time, and so I just had to learn from my errors and teacher. Eventually, I got the hang of it, and programming quickly turned into a small hobby, like painting. So far this course is a refre
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