I am a junior at Westmont. Over the last few years, I cultivated a vast skillset including leveraging third party software such as APIs and libraries to programmatically tackle problems me or other people faced in daily life. In the recent past, I began employing these skills in industries and found that a way I can distinguish myself from current software engineers in the industry would be not just take into account functionality but on performance. Consequently, I am taking this course to strengthen some of my core computer science concepts and allow me to optimize not just for functionality but for things such as time/space complexities and computational heaviness. I hope I can make some progress towards these goals and enjoy my time in the class alongside doing so.
In this course, I hope to learn of more algorthims that can be leveraged in the industry and how to employ them. My main success criterion in determining how close I get to this goal are :
- How effectively I can minimize time complexities
- How little time I can spend between understanding a problem and establishing the best way to tackle it algorithmically
- Whether I have some knowledge on how to optimize for other complexities such as space complexities, computational complexities and other things that are necassary in todays world (API token complexities, etc)