Memos From the Cube

Woohooo - exams are officially over! I’m now a free man for the next few months, excluding any contract work I decide to take up. Yesterday I recieved my results for my Java Algorithms class, which was to design an efficient (non-database) transaction system for a ficticious phone company. Emphasis was placed on efficiency, which was a nice change from regular “whatever works” Java classes; I got to do some proper profiling of my Java code and ended up with something quite decent (the fastest in the class, in fact).

From that, I’ve learned one interesting thing: Exceptions really aren’t that bad. Last year when I first started out into the mystical land of Exceptions I honestly couldn’t see the appeal — it just seemed like an alternative to the tried and true method of returning an error code in a function. Of course, I’ve since seen the light and I realise how powerful exceptions are and how much clearer exception handled code can be in contrast to the old methods. The fact that my assignment was the fastest (slightly edging out my friend Alan, who took a very similar approach to mine minus all the exceptions) seems to reinforce that notion.

I’ve also discovered the fearesome power of hindsight, along with my other discovery that Javadoc/Doxygen comments don’t have to make your code into a complete an utter unreadable mess. I really wish I found that out for myself sooner, since I’m now stuck documenting all my demos in the MyUSB library — and there are a lot of demos. Still, with the addition of a few extra “articles” in the documentation on how the demos work from a higher level than the raw code, the next release should be sock-propelling-off-feet good. There are a lot of other changes to the library scheduled for the next release as well, of course, including a fixed and cleaned version of the DFU bootloader — no more bugs and wonky logic!

I’m thinking of setting up a freely editable “brainstorm” wiki, for people to leave suggestions for me - either new projects, interesting things to investigate, or ideas on inproving my existing projects. The comments I’ve recieved here and via email have been good, but I’m perpetually in danger of losing some of them, so a Wiki or something similar seems like a good idea to me.

UPDATE: I’ve started the new suggestion Wiki here: http://wikihost.org/wikis/myusbsuggestion/.