Rana Banerjee banerRana

My Thoughts on Bradfield

I've been asked by several people over time about my experience with the classes offered by Bradfield, and thought that I should save some future keystrokes by writing up a short gist for future reference. Hopefully this gist will be useful for others who are considering Bradfield and wondering it is worth it. My intended audience is primarily Launch School students who have completed the Core program and likely also Capstone, but the majority of this gist will be applicable to anyone who is a working/experienced software engineer.

Since late 2019, I've taken 4 short courses from the Bradfield School of Computer Science and in 2021 I enrolled in their Computer Science Intensive (CSI) program¹. Overall, I've found the courses and CSI to be an excellent opportunity to grown my technical skills and broaden my knowledge of CS topics.

The courses I completed were:

Computer Architecture: The Hardware/Software Interface

I will often run this command to make sure all my docker containers are stopped and removed before running docker-compose up. Sometimes when you restart your system, old containers will start back up automatically in the background.

docker stop $(docker ps -aq) && docker rm $(docker ps -aq)

Set up remote debugging in dockerized Tomcat

Start Container, stock tomcat 8.5 in this example

$  docker run \
    -eJPDA_OPTS="-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,address=5005,server=y,suspend=n" \
    -p8080:8080 \

Distributed Systems

Lesson 1 - Introduction

Systems today are generally distributed, both in-house and third-party systems
Stream processing is batch processing but in smaller increments, it isn't real-time, but is quick
Project, work as pre and post work
Reliability
Scalability
Maintainability

	#!/usr/bin/python3

	from math import ceil
	from typing import List, Tuple
	from random import randint


	def bit_count(num: int) -> int:
	'''
	Same as len(bin(num)[2:])

	Optional.of(opt).map(value -> { System.out.println(value);
	return value; })
	.orElseGet(() -> { System.out.println("not present");
	return -1;});

	// Primitive hash function that for a string returns a positive 32 bit int
	// Do not use in production, use murmur3 or fnv1
	// You can improve this by changing 5 to 31
	Object.defineProperty(String.prototype, 'hashCode', {
	value: function() {
	var hash = 0, i, chr;
	for (i = 0; i < this.length; i++) {
	chr = this.charCodeAt(i);
	hash = ((hash << 5) - hash) + chr;
	hash \|= 0; // Convert to 32bit integer

	<cfscript>

	startedAt = getTickCount();

	inputFilepath = expandPath( "../images/beach-small.jpg" );

	// In the first approach to drawing a partially-transparent image over another, we're
	// going to create an intermediary image that represents the image overlay. This will
	// the SCALED and PARTIALLY-TRANSPARENT image.
	// --

	opt.<Runnable>map(value -> () -> System.out.println("Found " + value))
	.orElse(() -> System.out.println("Not present!"))
	.run();

	Optionals.ifPresentOrElse(opt, System.out::println,
	() -> System.out.println("not present"));