Weekly Journal : CompSci Autobiography

Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself. — Robin Sharma

Submitting Your Work

Push a Markdown formatted plain text file, named week01_autobiography.md, to the individual portfolio_NETID repository provided for you in the course's Gitlab group (do not fork this repository, just clone it directly).

All submissions for this course will be based on only the version of your files in the provided Gitlab repository by 3:08am ET in the morning on the day after that given on the course Calendar (effectively a few extra hours grace time past midnight).

Markdown is an industry standard, simple, plain text format for providing style guidelines that can be transformed into any other document format. IntelliJ includes a Markdown editor that provides a preview or there are web-based editors that provides similar functionality.

Specification

Before starting this course, take a moment to reflect on your goals and motivations for the semester and how your programming experiences have affected you and shaped your decision to study Computer Science and to take this course specifically.

These questions are intended to help us get to know you better and will not affect your grade in any way. Answer honestly and explain your thoughts to help us better understand and work with you:

• How did you become interested in Computer Science?
• Describe a favorite programming project you have worked on.
• Describe your best or worst programming experience.
• How do you use programming outside of class, in your daily life?
• What is your primary motivation for taking this course?
• Would you encourage a younger relative to pursue Computer Science?
  If so, what advice would give them? If not, what would your concerns be?
• What role, if any, do you think Computer Scientists should have in solving societal-level problems?
• How do you see yourself using your Computer Science skills in the future?
• What, if any, steps do you take to deliberately plan and design the code you write?
• For future team exercise experiments, name your three favorite and three least favorite make-believe characters (from books, movies, games, etc.). For each, include a word or two describing what you like or dislike about the character.

AI Coding Assistants

Consider the possible usefulness and ethics of using AI Coding Assistants when you are programming. Reactions have ranged from they replace StackOverflow, Google, and even Junior Developer to they are useless because they produce wrong answers and are trained on bad as well as good examples. This semester, I am planning to discuss with you the pros and cons of using ChatGPT and its ethical, practical and technical implications, especially given that this is still just an early prototype of the technology and it will surely improve over the next few years.

If you have not already tried GitHub's Copilot (free for students), Replit's GhostWriter (free for students), or OpenAI's ChatGPT (free basic level), either try using one directly (each requires an account) or watch some of the many videos of others using them.

• How might AI Coding Assistants be used effectively to assist you when writing code?
• What are some limitations and considerations you think AI Coding Assistants have regarding generating code?
• Why do you feel it is ethical to use AI Coding Assistants?
• Why do you feel it is not ethical to use AI Coding Assistants?

Of course it should not be necessary to remind you that you should not use ChatGPT to generate your answer (thoughts) on this topic.