Don’t Want No Compromise

Recently, I have been listening to this song called Sacrifice by Bebe Rexha on repeat and even though the lyrics could be viewed as trite and insipid I interpreted the lyrics in a more abstract sense. For example, based on the lyrics, if there is something that you truly desire there is going to be some element of sacrifice involved and you have to be iron-willed; hence, there should be no compromise. Personally, this seemingly random thought is a relevant application to my situation where I have to be willing to sacrifice my time and other obligations in order to ensure that all of my user stories get delivered on time.   

Challenges

• Debating between whether to use (def combo) or (defn get-combo [board])
  • When using def usually you are assuming that the value will more or less be ***static ***
  • On the other hand, defn seems to be more fitting if get-combo utilizes math/other functions to generate a vector of all the ***winning row combos ***

TIL

• some func: returns the first logical true value of (pred x) for any x in coll
• when - (when test & body) evaluates the test and if true evaluates the body (in an implicit do)
• Obvious but it does not help to be reminded once again: (not nil) evaluates to true

Observations

• When you properly decompose a problem into appropriate subproblems & write a good test suite to go along with the *helper function *that successfully solves that subproblem –> the end result is a concise, elegant line of code that solves that problem.
  • Slowly gaining a deeper appreciation of Clojure as it empowers you to write powerful code with few words.
• some func returns nil if there is **no ***x *in coll that returns ***true ***

ToDos - What I Worked On

• Refactored win? func using the new helper functions: get-combo and all-same-marker?
• Create a map for end game message, e.g. (def msg {:win "winner winner chicken dinner" :tie "cat's game!"})
• (Not yet done) Refactor get-nth-row and get-board by using partition instead of subvec
  • This goes to show that there are different ways to get a problem done, but often times there is a more straightforward, simpler solution

Putting in the Work 

Overall, I’m glad how today went in terms of being able to stick to my schedule and focusing mainly on getting the TicTacToe human vs human user story completed. I believe I should be able to get it done by early Friday and the plan is to send my user story to Micah and Gina and wait for their thoughts/feedback. Obviously, there is a huge advantage to getting the user stories done early as it gives you enough cushion (in terms of time) to deal with any risks.