Previous experiences that relate to my internship responsibilities

 In my first semester at Berea, I took an Android phone application development course that was a project-based and student-led course between Berea and Codepath organization. This experience directly relates to my current internship since my project will contain a component of building an Android application using Java. Although I did not take a course that mainly used Java programming language, the projects I worked on in the Android development course helped me practice applying Java to mobile application development. Also, I have not found it hard to understand how different parts of the codebase work because Java is an Object-Oriented programming language like C++ which I used for my Data Structures and Algorithms course and in my internship project last summer. One new aspect of the Java code in my project codebase if that there are more access modifiers than in C++. Access modifiers are a set of keywords that specify where data or methods are accessible in a program. For example, a method defined as public means it is accessible everywhere while a modifier like private means that the data or method might be limited to be accessed in certain places. The two access modifiers I used in C++ were private and public, however, Java code has more identifiers like final in addition to the C++ modifiers.

Having previous exposure to some Android phone application development and object-oriented programming has helped me quickly set up my development environment and run the development applications. This came in handy when I got different errors in setting up my work environment that resembled the errors I had seen in previous Android projects. Another important aspect of having previous experience in Java was knowing how to ask good questions from the engineers who had worked on Android development before. My previous experience helped me know different parts of Android studio like the Device Manager, gradle, and build variants that were in the error messages I received. Knowing these parts of the environment helped me ask specific questions and know where to apply the different answers I received.

Would I have had a different experience in the past three weeks if I had no prior experience in Java? To a large extent, it would have taken me longer to get everything setup if Java and Android Studio were completely new to me. It would have taken me longer to apply some of the answers I received because they were not detailed with where to find certain features, and prior experience helped me know the location of these features.