New Blog: the "How Can Renee Make This Code Better" blog

Over the weekend, I worked on the CS class I'm taking online, and solved a problem that had been frustrating me. I got so giddy when it worked and so wanted to show it to someone that I took a screenshot and posted it on my Facebook wall.

A couple of friends commented on the picture, and my friend Ben even went so far as to IM me and start giving feedback. I find it much more satisfying to do work when other people who understand what you're doing can see it and tell you what they think. At Stanford, students who are actually enrolled in the class get "interactive grading sessions," where the TA will sit down with them for 30 min to review the code and discuss what's good and bad about it. This is particularly important, since you can write a program that completes the task required, but still have produced a poor program; there are usually more than one ways to get the task done, and some strategies are more efficient or flexible to change than others.

I don't have a Stanford TA, and I can't walk to the next workstation and ask a Google engineer what he or she thinks about my program, but I do have inquisitive, generous friends who have studied programming, so I'm creating this other blog in the hopes of getting that interaction which is so important to learning CS.

Blog: http://reneecoding.blogspot.com/