Learning Blog

1.) Relational databases are better suited for large amounts of data, or data which is written/overwritten many times by multiple users. A spreadsheet would be hard to manage if it were used to record account activity at a large bank for example. Databases allow for performance optimizations to handle data more efficiently. It's also harder to secure data and manage user access on a spreadsheet in comparison to relational databases. 2.) Databases are particularly useful when data is too complex to be handled by a simple system. Large corporations produce large amounts of data, and databases help these businesses avoid data outages, ensure the integrity of data as it's being updated by thousands of daily transactions, and provide administrators with plenty of control over who gets to access sensitive portions of the data. 3.) I'm particularly interested in learning about how software engineering teams at large corporations use databases, and hour their specific needs influen

 The Jotto assignment was really helpful in understanding Java classes, and testing Java code. I got to practice using built-in Java methods and writing and reading to files, which I don't often do. As far as approaching the assignment now versus then, I believe I would make use of design patterns I learned later in the course just to practice. Two victories for me this semester are learning to build Android apps using Java, and using design patterns on an actual software app. I had been exposed to building Android apps with Kotlin, but it was rewarding to try it with Java since I've come across Kotlin code that makes reference to Java-specific language syntax or features. I also enjoyed learning about design patterns. It's useful to know about these patterns because I can apply them to other types of programming. Three skills I improved were programming in Java, using interfaces for polymorphism (especially when classes implementing them are very different from each other)