JHammond CSUMB

     I found the assignments this week to be a lot of fun. I really enjoy coding challenges that feel like brain teasers. As for the material, recursion was definitely the trickiest part for me. I had to take my time with those questions on the quiz and did a bit of extra reading to get a better grasp on it. I’ve found that recursion makes a lot more sense when I see it in action through code, rather than trying to understand it in the abstract.

 This week we worked on a palindrome puzzle. I immediately recognized it from when I solved a similar one on LeetCode a few years ago, though back then I used Python. My first instinct was to use a two pointer approach, but I specifically remembered this one because the optimal Python solution was a one liner: return string.lower() == reversed(string.lower()) I looked up the equivalent syntax in Java and gave that a try. Once I got that working, I added the logic to remove any non alphanumeric characters from the input and then ran the provided test cases to verify the results. Overall it was a really fun assignment.