Ricky Steele, a student at Udacity and a working professional used the concepts of caching (CS101) and regular expressions (CS262) to improve his workflow. We asked him a few questions about this and his experience as a Udacity student. Here’s what he had to say:
What was the first Udacity course you took?
CS101
What class(es) are you taking now?
CS212 and CS262
Can you describe the breakthrough you had at work after taking a Udacity course?
I’ve had two of them so far.
The first involved a C# program that I was writing to sort files using information from a database. It was making so many queries to the database that it was slowing down the program and the database server. Luckily, many of the queries that the program was making were duplicates. I needed a way to save data from new queries. More importantly, I needed a way to quickly check if a query had been previously used and to retrieve the saved results of previously used queries. In other words, I needed a cache. The concept of caching wasn’t new to me, but there was a clever example presented in one of the CS101 homework problems that did it in a simple and fast way using Python dictionaries. C#’s dictionary class was very similar to Python’s, and I was able to use the homework example to create a functional cache in a very short amount of time, while using very few lines of code.
The second time involved a different C# program that I was writing to fix some database fields that were not formatted properly. I needed to get the data from the fields in the database, parse the data, re-organize the data, and then put the corrected data back in the database. The most difficult part of this program was going to be parsing and re-organizing the data because some of it was very messed up. Luckily, I had recently finished watching lectures about regular expressions in CS262. C# has a regular expression library too, and the syntax for the regular expressions was no different from Python. Regular expressions made the task of picking out dates, words, lines, and punctuation much simpler than looping through all of the text and doing tons of substring comparisons.
Have you shared your breakthrough with any co-workers?
I was working with a co-worker on these programs and he was pretty impressed with the elegant solutions I came up with. He seems to be getting more and more interested in taking the Udacity courses himself.
Was the primary reason for taking a Udacity course; to improve your workflow or was it just a coincidence? If it was a coincidence, what did you expect to get out of the course?
It was a coincidence. I primarily code in C# and C++ at work, so I did not expect for much of the stuff in these Python-based courses to transfer over. I was expecting to learn Python and get some practice solving some programming exercises.
What is the importance of continuing your education as a professional?
It’s very important. Technologies come and go, and if you don’t stay up-to-date on the latest tools, libraries, and languages you might find yourself getting left behind.
How was it taking a class and balancing your work schedule?
It wasn’t very difficult at all, but that’s probably because I have some programming background and I am limiting myself to no more than two courses at a time.
Why did you decide to take a class at Udacity?
I first heard about Udacity on social media websites shortly after the first round of Coursera classes ended. I was looking forward to the next round of Coursera courses, but they were all delayed. I was looking for something to do until they started up, so I decided to give Udacity a shot.
I was interested in learning Python for a long time, but I never could find the time or the motivation to get started. I thought that with these classes I could learn it in just a few hours a week by watching some videos and doing some exercises.
Well Ricky, we here at Udacity are really happy you are taking classes. We are ecstatic that you decided to share you success with us and all of the Udacians out there. Has Udacity improved your life or work in any way? We’d love to hear about it! E-mail us: social@udacity.com with your story so we can share it with the world!
