A Quick Note on Progress

As of tomorrow it'll be two weeks since I made my first post stating my intention to write up my solutions to the SICP exercises. In those two weeks I've written up the first 28 exercises, which means I'm averaging 2 per day. Of course some of them are quick, taking 10 minutes tops to write up. Some of them, however, have taken considerably longer and involved significant head-scratching, looking up details of the interpreter I'm using and other niceties.

Now at the moment I'm playing catch-up... Some of my colleagues and I started working our way through SICP nearly 11 weeks ago and, barring one week off for good behaviour, we've been slowly working through the book in a weekly reading group. As of this coming week's meeting, we'll be up to the start of section 2.3. That's a grand total of 97 exercises we've passed on the way, so I'm about a quarter of the way through writing up - but of course it's a moving target!

I should say that we're not dictating that everyone must do every exercise, or write a book report each week. When we get together we chat about any interesting topics raised in the section we've decided to cover or any problems we had with the exercises. I've been a good boy so far and managed to produce a solution to each exercise every week. Something that this blog has reitterated to me though is that writing up work for public consumption is different from doing it for your own benefit.

For example, when I originally tackled exercise 1.14 as part of our weekly reading group homework, I was happy to state that obviously the algorithm had order of growth in steps of Θ(n^m) . However, I realised that in order to turn this into a blog post I was going to have to show why that's the case. I'm still not overly happy with my answer to this particular exercise (I feel like my assertions at the end to get from Θ(n²) to Θ(n^m) are almost cheating), but it's much better than simply stating the growth!

Anyway, if I can carry on at this rate then I should have caught up by Hallowe'en. Of course that's always assuming I can maintain this initial burst of enthusiasm for so long... and that my family continue to let me steal away for an hour or so every so often to do exercises and write-ups! I'm also hoping that at somepoint along the way I'll feel that my technical communication skills have been given a bit of a boost. Which, to be honest, is one of the main reasons for blogging my solutions.

Right. Back to it now. Got another few exercises to finish off before this week's meeting. If I'm really lucky I might also manage to write up another few exercises later on this evening.