December 2nd, 2025 Wk05: Learning Journal Markov

 December 2nd, 2025

Wk05: Learning Journal Markov

Work with your fellow classmates and go through your solutions to the Markov assignment. You can check on Discord if your team is non-responsive just make a note in your submission.

Who did you work with?

Ashley and France

You can work with 1-3 people, at least 1 other person is required.

What was your strategy for solving the Markov assignment?

My strategy was to take baby steps and add methods one at a time to see if I could get them to work. It had a unit test so I was able to know what the project required and build slowly. Reading the markovtest made it much easier to understand what each should do, ex hashmap, punctuation, randomWord, toString, etc. 

Did you start writing code right away? Did you plan it out on paper? 

I read the markovtest first and built on that. I started writing code and messed up a lot. Writing code blindly without understanding what it should do caused more work so I went back to the markovtest to see what was wrong. 

What strategy did your classmates use?

Ashley: "for markov my strategy was My strategy was going method by method, running tests after completely 2-3 methods ensuring that nothing was breaking. I made sure to prioritize the methods that other methods were contingent on. After everything was working and the logic was cleaned-up, I went in and added javadoc comments as needed."

France: "was using the Gradle with strings for solving the Markov assignment."

How would you change your strategy having worked on the assignment?

I would read the UML more and pay attention to tiny formatting details. I got tripped up un "__$" and others a lot and took some time to find extra spaces. In the future I think I will use debugging less and rely on tests to see if the output is correct. Also, writing simple placeholders will help, I created a lot more work early on thinking I knew what I was doing by adding in huge chunks of my code skeleton too soon. 

According to your classmate(s): how well does your code follow the Google Java Style GuideLinks to an external site.?

Ashley: "methods look well-polished and is readable to clear. File looks tidy and neat as well. Only suggestion would be to add formal javadoc comments with param and return tag so its even more understandable what each method is doing."

France:"Your code follows very well too. My two suggestions are putting an if-else statement after the public String toString and replacing the last if(words.containskey with a catch statement."

Did you know you can automate applying some of the style guide rulesLinks to an external site.?

Yes :3