Grok Learning Journal - Week 3 Part 2 - Lists < Dictionaries

There isn't too much to report on at this point in the challenge. The difficulty's peaked as far as the challenges go, which makes it more engaging. Content-wise, there's a big emphasis on while loops and lists... that's about it.

Grok Learning Journal - Week 2 Part 1 - Superman!?!!?

As Week 1 of the NCSS challenge moves below the horizon, Week 2 decides to show its face. The first part of this week focuses on string modification code. In my opinion, most of this is rendered obsolete by Regular Expressions Operations, but it's a good place to start. The screen capture above is from the final exercise of Week 2 Part 1; a reasonably easy exercise in which you are simply required to declare a few variables and chop up the strings a bit. Can't wait to see what's in store for Part 2!

Grok Learning Journal - Pre Competition - Get Pumped!

Get Pumped for the NCSS Challenge! As part of my IT class at school, I will be taking part in the Intermediate NCSS Challenge. I've just finished the Code Academy python course and am really excited to begin the challenge. I'm really looking forward to improving my python abilities and having fun along the way!

Grok Learning Journal - Week 1 Part 2 - Basic Arithmetic

Now that it is the second half of week one, I think I've got my head wrapped around all of Grok's interface. No more mistakes like back in Part 1! Anyways, this section of the challenge was comprised mostly of using standard operators to do basic arithmetic... so pretty basic stuff. The above exercise (the one in the screen cap) was probably the most complicated of this section as it involved "elif" and embedded "if" statements. Although it wasn't particularly difficult, it DID take me the longest to complete.

Grok Learning Journal - Week 4 - Dictionaries

The primary focus of the fourth week of the NCSS challenge was python dictionaries. They seem to be an efficient method of listing data that can then be referred to later in the code. Overall, it has been interesting and somewhat enlightening to learn about this syntax... They take a long time to write out, though!

Grok Learning Journal - Post-Challenge Post - Comments

The screen capture above displays the use of comments in one of my NCSS challenge exercises.
Comments are useful in the real world such as in software engineering jobs in which your code may need to be passed to others who then need to continue your code. If there are variables or functions defined in your code, it may be hard to follow and so comments can be utilised to make the code easier to understand.
I have not used comments throughout the rest of the challenge as I am the only one who needs to interpret the code and, in general, the codes are fairly short and concise; meaning that it is reasonably difficult to get lost in the code regardless.

Grok Learning Journal - Week 5 - Huh, Capitals

1 incorrect submission for this exercise

I did not know, originally, that when using regular expression syntax and using re.sub, it did not omit the upper-case versions of the letters also. I just decided to add in uppercase vowels as well, to fix the problem; just another fidgety thing about python.

Grok Learning Journal - Week 3 Part 1 - Dat XKCD

Well, this week has been pretty enjoyable, as far as it goes; my only problem was that in the first exercise of this they had a link to an xkcd webcomic:
http://xkcd.com/936/
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, yup. Productivity = 0 at that point. WHY, GROK, WHY!?!!?!

Grok Learning Journal - Week 2 Part 2 - Like Diamonds Falling Down

Just crusin' through week 2, all the exercises pretty easy...  then this:

Diamonds. In my opinion, by far the hardest/most annoying exercise so far. I finished all the other exercises in 2 days, but I only managed to get this challenge done 50 minutes before the end of the second week. Like, dayum. I understand that it's going to get much harder, but just all the formatting errors I got with this code. Ah well, hopefully next week won't be as bad...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNCgfrjKcqs

Grok Learning Journal - Week 1 Part 1 - If only I had known that earlier

This is a screenshot of my failed attempts at on of the challenges

Before I realised that submissions were tracked and the amount of submissions affected your score, I was using the "Submit" button to check the errors in my code rather than running it. Ah well, apparently the first week doesn't count towards your score an is somewhat of a "practice week". At least I won't make this mistake when it counts.

I feel that there should have been a "how to use Grok" tutorial just for those new to the interface; in saying that, it only took a day or two to get used to - so it wouldn't be particularly necessary.