Personal Reflection #7

You guys get to listen to me talk about programming one last time...

I completed my scheduling program for my work, but there was one major problem. I based the entire thing off of jobs from last year because I did not know this years jobs at the time. Now that I do, my challenge has been to incorporate changes. However, one of my goals is to have New Student Programs (who I work for) be able to use my program after I'm gone. So, I've had to come up with a creative way to be able to have the program compile without having things that need to change from year.

I had already made use of inputting information into the program via reading in text from various .txt files, so I figured it was the best route. However, the question I had to ask myself was how can I have the program read in the information without knowing how much is written. The answer came to me when I was remembering what my computer science professor said about something called ArrayLists. They basically allow you to create a list of something without knowing the final size. Using this idea, I was able to implement a new design to my program, and now it can read in different jobs and people, and assign those people to fill the jobs, no matter how many people/jobs are changed. While I still have a few bugs to work out, I can look back and see that when I thought of my program in a more creative way, I was able to implement features that make it more valuable altogether.