Class Journal Week 3

Eddie Azinge's Responses

1. Pull out a quote from the first two sections of “What is Code?” that you think directly relates to what you experienced in the individual portion of this assignment. Explain why this quote is particularly resonant for you.
   • "Every character truly, truly matters. Every single stupid misplaced semicolon, space where you meant tab, bracket instead of a parenthesis—mistakes can leave the computer in a state of panic." - Paul Ford's "What is code?", Section 2.3
   • This quote specifically resonates with me from this homework assignment, specifically the bit about 'every single stupid [...] bracket instead of a parenthesis.' At the tail end of the assignment, when I was transforming the raw curl'd output into a neatly formatted version, I had made the mistake of using a pair of brackets instead of a pair of parenthesis in the grep regex `<(BR|PRE)>`, and vice versa in the sed regex `s/<[^>]*>//g`. This lost me a good chunk of time, as I couldn't figure out what other part of my command would have been wrong. It was only after I had thrown my regex into an evaluator that I realized that I had confused their definitions, and my code finally worked. Ford's comment about every character truly mattering resonated quite a bit with me after that.
2. What do you think you need in order to grow more comfortable, confident, and effective with the command line and manipulating data at a “raw” level?
   • All I believe I need is more practice interfacing with the command line and with data. Until recently, I haven't needed to use the command line in order to generate and format data, but if I were to work on more projects that require the functionality of retrieving data from some remote server, then I believe that necessity would force me to become more effective with the command line and manipulating data at a “raw” level.

Cazinge (talk) 14:28, 16 September 2017 (PDT)