Day 28

It was nice to start today a little ahead on work. I have all stories related to my Tic Tac Toe board completed starting the week on monday, so the next 3 days are going to be focused on my Kata and my HashMap project. Between the two projects, I ended up starting today off with my Kata for two reasons. one, I need to practice this daily so getting it down earlier allows more room for practice, and two, This kata is dipping my feet into relatively new territory with a GUI implementation.

For this kata I was given a few options for which turing machine algorithm I wish to solve, I chose to settle on Langton’s ant. Before I dived into the GUI implementation, I was focused on just solving the kata logically. The rules are simple so coming up with a good solution was relatively quick.

The implementation of the UI was notably harder. I ended up using the library quill, I found there to be some learning curve with the tools, but it wasn’t too bad. Near the end of the day I had my kata working with the GUI. Seeing my algorithm work in a visual representation was fun to watch as it follows a seemingly random pattern, but after about 10,000 steps it begins following a repeated “ant highway”.

With my kata in a good spot, I finished my day by practicing the kata itself a few more times. This kata is a bit trickier than usual for the demonstration solely because the implementation takes a number of helper functions. It’s a little hard to express my thought process in a linear fashion while staying true to TDD.