November 16th, 2025

Considering how clean code was recently on my mind (mostly due to a recent assignment), I thought it might be interesting to look into. I ended up finding out that there a various style guides (well, a comic from an assignment also showed me that too) and this blog shows some examples. It is nice as a basic overview of some style guides. It most notably noted 3 types of styles that revolve around whitespace usage and brace placement. It compliments what I was learning in class as the class typically focused on things like function and variable names, reducing the amount of nested loops, and the usage of too many parameters. The blog goes over how some styles place braces in a way to make it easier to parse through things like heavily nested loops and such. These both end up telling of ways to increase clarity but in different ways, which is super fascinating.

Interestingly, this led to me to look at my own code. My current code uses the “Allman” style of braces. This was taught to me back in AP Computer Science back in high school. I vaguely remember “Allman” being discussed in class, but I never made the connection between it and how I typed code. I ended up doing it since it was the easiest to read. Well, that and the professor told me that this was the “proper” way to code. (I vaguely remember the thing I did code in also automatically did it for me too.) Since then, I’d sometimes just go around and putting braces in that format. (Perhaps I’m worse off due to this since I overly rely on a style. I’ll need to learn to read other styles soon.)

Overall, I’ve mainly noticed my code is super, super bad. Like, overly bad. So next time I code something, I should do many different things. This blog I picked and the assignments on “clean code” would be a good start honestly. (Unfortunately, as someone who “thinks by doing,” I had a habit of creating copious amounts of technical debt without even realizing it. Then again, I was always the type to prefer redoing things entirely as opposed to looking for minor improvements….) Maybe one day my code will be actually good for once. And thankfully, I’ve got various places to start improving. There’s a long road ahead…. Well, at least that means that I have a lot of ways I can improve; the plateau isn’t here just yet. In fact, it is very far from where I am.

https://iannis.io/blog/the-ultimate-code-style/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Ryan's Blog Maybe. by Ryan N and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

October 21st, 2025

Recently, my class has been going over stuff regarding teamwork and ways to approach building a software or product. For example, the waterfall method, agile methodology, and scrum have come up in discussion. This has reminded me of POGIL since POGIL was a group used in the classroom semi-frequently.

Because of this correlation, I decide to look at blogs about POGIL. However, I noticed something interesting about the blog I chose. So I chose two just because I found some things interesting. The first was made with WordPress.com, much like the one I’m making here. It was about POGIL. The blog appeared to just be called “The POGIL Project.” Or, that’s what I have surmised after looking at the web address. Additionally, there was some interesting notes regarding how it appears to be designed for faculty teaching or implementing POGIL based team activities. However, the last post appears to be in 2015, which is not as recent as I’d like. (However, there appears to be someone who has the same name as the author of this blog who is cited to be impactful to the development of POGIL. Which is pretty cool, though I couldn’t concretely find evidence that they were the same person.)

So, I looked for an alternative. The author was not listed which isn’t great but it is recent. It appears to also be about POGIL. But the most interesting part was how it was applied to science as opposed to actual computer science. Actually, both blogs do that as well.

This new blog I picked was basically an overview of how POGIL works and why it is good to use. It overviewed the reasons why POGIL is used and what it is intended to do. It basically overlaps with what I know about POGIL already.

In a way, this is interesting in how this mean POGIL is both universal and useful. It isn’t just a weird Computer Science class thing we do, it’s an actual science thing. Which is definitely more interesting to know about considering I rarely encountered POGIL before college. It probably won’t really affect my opinion on POGIL but it is mildly interesting how it is something that I’ll see around. I guess I can keep that in mind.

FIRST INITIAL BLOG: https://thepogilproject.wordpress.com/

SECOND, REVIEWED BLOG POST: https://www.transtutor.blog/pogil-guide-high-school-biology

From the blog CS@Worcester – Ryan's Blog Maybe. by Ryan N and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

October 5th, 2025

Recently, I’ve been working on using Git. This came in the form of using a little bit of GitHub, a little bit of GitLab, and the textbook made to help instruct me on how to use them. I began to learn the basics of repositories, and how to make edits and pull requests.

For example, I am now able to create a fork from a repository, create a remote origin, a clone of that onto my local device, make edits using Visual Studio Code, stage those edits, commit those edits, push those edits back to my remote origin, then establish a pull request. And a little bit more. So far, this Quarter of my class has been pretty interesting. I will note how the public changes and such are very interesting to me. I don’t usually like being in public places often because I assume I should be competent before doing anything in public, but oh well.

For the blog post I selected, I wanted to know just a smidge more about Git, since I was learning about it. (This will be linked below at the bottom of this post.) It mostly discusses the future plans for Git and potential for AI.

Honestly, there isn’t much for me to really do from this. I just note how AI appears to be Git stuff I currently use, so that’s mildly interesting. Though, I found it interesting that Git, much like I, is currently developing. It’s fun to think about how I learn and improve as a person that other things in the world are doing the same. While they are wildly different contexts, I find it cool. Everything is always changing and such. Even as I learn, I make notes that aren’t in the textbook to myself. Git will probably always get things added by various different people as well.

It encourages and intimidates me in some way. It’s very cool that by the time I “get caught up” it’ll be better than what I’m currently using, but at the same time, what if everything I learned becomes redundant? Though, for me, I was always a person to enjoy experiences, and I never really liked the idea of a limit. If anything, it is just more “fun” for me. There’s more to learn and I’ll never be caught up. My experiences will lead to my growth, so when the time comes, I’ll be much more suited to using the new tools that arrive.

https://github.blog/open-source/whats-next-for-git-20-years-in-the-community-is-still-pushing-forward/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Ryan's Blog Maybe. by Ryan N and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.