The art of collaboration: Aletha and Tony’s Programming Project

It's been an amazing journey collaborating with Tony on this recent project. We both come from different backgrounds, but together, we used our own particular strengths to create something really remarkable.

Our goal was to build a system to automate tasks and produce reports on different aspects of data. Working side by side, we started by designing an algorithm that would capture and organize the data. We then decided to use Java as our language for implementation, as it provides great scalability and versatility.

After establishing the structure and initial data capture, we then had to work on creating functions to interpret the data. This is where we discovered some of the most interesting concepts in coding. Working together, we created lines of code to facilitate sorting and merging.

For example, we used a method that takes a set of numbers and returns them sorted numerically in ascending order:

public static int[] sortNumbers(int[] numbers) {

  int[] sortedNumbers = numbers.clone();

  for (int i = 0; i < sortedNumbers.length - 1; i++) {
    for (int j = 0; j < sortedNumbers.length - i - 1; j++) {
      if (sortedNumbers[j] > sortedNumbers[j+1]) {
        int tmp = sortedNumbers[j];
        sortedNumbers[j] = sortedNumbers[j+1];
        sortedNumbers[j+1] = tmp;
      }
    }
  }

  return sortedNumbers;

}

In addition to sorting, we also developed a method to merge two objects, which returns a combined object with all the elements of each object merged together:

public static Object merge(Object obj1, Object obj2) {

  // create a copy of each object
  HashMap<String, Object> merged = new HashMap<>();
  merged.putAll((Map<? extends String, ? extends Object>) obj1);
  merged.putAll((Map<? extends String, ? extends Object>) obj2);

  return merged;
}

At every stage of the project, Tony and I exchanged ideas and opinions. We were able to come up with solutions that were efficient and scalable. In the end, we succeeded in creating a production-ready system that was used by our team for other projects.

We had so much fun with this collaboration and we were able to come up with something really creative and valuable. This experience has taught us both so much about the power of collaboration!