Salt's Tech Journal

3/16/25

Shift + Alt + F runs the configured formatter.

Ctrl + Shift + F searches the text contents of all files in the workspace.

Ctrl + Shift + K removes an entire line.

Ctrl + B hides the sidebar.

"Better Comments" offers highlighting for TODO comments, questions, other comments.

"Code Spell Checker" will note typos.

"Error Lens" may portrays errors better.

"Indent Rainbow" colors different levels of indentation.

Consider AI assistant?

VC Code Great Icons: icon pack.

VS Code Pets.

Power Mode.

Discord Presence.

3/13/25

Math is an object! Math.random(), Math.floor(), et cet!

2025.02.18

Completed the Gradebook App exercise on freeCodeCamp. It's worth noting that I used an if else statement when a much conciser alternative was available:

function hasPassingGrade(score) { 

                    return getGrade(score) !== "F"; 

                }

In other news, I might like ChatGPT's color scheme too much.

2025.02.17

I decided to work with ChatGPT to see how well it could handle pseudocode (or, from a different perspective, to see how interpretable my pseudocode was). I provided the following prompt:

I have a set of test scores and need to write a function that will find the average of any set of test scores. Please write a function, called "getAverage", that can take an arbitrary number of scores, contained in a single array, and find the average score.

The function must fit the following pseudocode:

Inside the function getAverage, let totalScores = array.length
Let sum = 0.
Add the first item in the array to sum.
Remove the first item in the array.
Check the length of the array.
If array length > 0, return to step 4.
Else, let averageScore = sum / totalScores
Return as the result of getAverage

ChatGPT returned the following:

function getAverage(array) {

                                        let totalScores = array.length; // Step 1 

                    let sum = 0; // Step 2 

                

                    // Step 3-6: Loop through the array, adding the first item to sum and removing it

                    while (array.length > 0) { 

                        sum += array[0];  // Add the first item to sum 

                        array.shift();     // Remove the first item in the array 

                    } 

                

                    // Step 7: Calculate the average score 

                    let averageScore = sum / totalScores; 

                

                    // Step 8: Return the result 

                    return averageScore; 

                } 

                

                // Example usage: 

                let testScores = [90, 80, 70, 85, 95]; 

                console.log(getAverage(testScores));  // Output: 84

I'll pick this apart later. If I'm going to use ChatGPT, I want to make sure that it gives me code that I don't understand (or at least code that I do not go on to understand), and also it did not take exactly the same approach that I would have taken, and I want to understand why. For now, though, it's late, and I need to do a few other things before I go to bed.