Day 5

Today was a continuation of my work from yesterday and the day before. I worked on the same things, and I’m getting closer to finishing iteration 2. I ended up finishing the last of the Euler problems I was assigned, which is great because it leaves plenty of room to practice my Prime Factors Kata and watch the rest of the Uncle Bob videos I have assigned this week.

My last few Euler’s were quite fun. The 9th one was especially tricky, I had to find three pythagorean triples that summed to 1000. I tried a brute force method by checking each of the values of a, b, and c. Not only was this incredibly inefficient with an O(n^3) time complexity, it also seemed to not work consistently. As a result I took a different approach and after a bit of research I found a much better solution at an O(n^2) time complexity.

I also watched a few Uncle Bob videos today on the Clean Coders website. Needless to say, his videos are great resources. I love the way he breaks down concepts and gives examples of what he means for structuring, form, and other good practices. I’ve been applying these lessons into my Euler problems each day. Today I focused a lot on making functions only do one thing. This process involved making many smaller functions with their own single purpose, while also using names that were intuitive for reading.

The last thing I worked on today was my Clojure Kata’s, I mostly spent that time going through the problem once again, making sure I understand the concepts, the syntax, and how I would make tests iteratively from simple to more complex inputs.