Week One

Thoughts

• Solving algorithms has reminded me of my love for programming. I haven't programmed anything, beyond some JavaScript tutorials here and there, in a really long time. I enjoy it, I find it stimulating (if not demoralising at times).
• I hate to say it but using AI as a kind of mentor has been helpful. It's been really hard trying to find anyone in Europe to mentor me spesifically in browser engineering, so the AI helps. Somethings the AI has helped with:
  • Creating a 6 month roadmap of concepts I should learn to get into browser engineering.
  • Exercises to practice algorithms at my level.
  • Exercises to practice C++ concepts, e.g. I have a list of exercises to practice creating classes which also covers inheritence and polymorphism.
• Codecademy is in the business of selling dreams & I think it's quite immoral. I struggle to see how any of their courses can make you ready for the job market.

What I Covered

• This week I learnt about source files, headers and classes in C++. Ruby has classes and object oriented programming so that wasn't new to me, but files and headers were. I refactored my basic algos into their own files and included the headers into main.
• Fibonacci got me stumped. Not so much the formula, but Project Euler's Even Fibonacci Numbers problem. I was really close to solving it and spent days thinking about it before giving up and looking at a solution. There's a gap in my understanding about recursion. This was my attempt:

int sumFib(int n) {
      int sum = 0;
      int i = 2;
      while (i < 4000000) {
        int x = sumFib(n-1) + sumFib(n-2);
        if (x % 2 == 0) {
          sum += x;
        }
        ++i;
      }
      return sum;
    }

• `x` is never going to be what I expect it to be though because of the recursion. I know I need to capture the value and update the values. The solution I found does this:

int sumFib(int a, int b){
        if (a > 4000000) {
            return 0;
        }
        if (a % 2 == 0) {
            return a + sumFib(b, a+b);
        }
        return sumFib(b, a +b);
    }

• The second `if` statement is where I was fumbling, instead of trying to store the sum at a particular point to evaluate it, I should have evaluated something that's static at some point during the program. Even though `a` is a variable, I can trust that with each run of the program it holds the same value until I update it.