Today I completed module four of eleven and started module five in the Coursera class Master Java Web Services and REST API with Spring Boot. This is going well.

Tomorrow the 2025 Qiskit Global Summer School starts and I’m a little excited and a little nervous. In the past I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time as I would have liked to the coursework because I had a job. It’s not a graded course but there could be a certification if I can complete all the work. Things might go better this time, although I would have liked to spend more time on the pre-work. sigh That’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

Anyway, stay tuned…

Today I eased back into #100DaysOfCode with two Leetcode problems.

Leetcode #7 “Reverse Integer” is labeled “medium” but with some java.lang built-in classes it was way easier than it should have been. I know Leetcode medium and hard problems are sometimes rough. Is it cheating to use Java classes (StringBuilder, Integer)? Or is this the wisdom of using the language tools available to me?

Leetcode #10 “Regular Expression Matching” is another surprisingly easy problem labeled “medium” with the implementation of Java classes (Pattern, Matcher). Was I supposed to do this iterating over a string and comparing characters? Pass, thanks, when there are built-in classes available to do this for me.

Tomorrow I’m planning to finish a Coursera Spring Boot module, number four out of eleven. It’s going quickly. Thankfully my past experience with Spring has helped a lot here. In fact, most of my previous Spring knowledge was gleaned from working with the framework in many projects across two different companies. And working through these modules has helped connect the dots and fill in gaps in my knowledge. I’m enjoying it!

Stay tuned…

Hello, Friends -

Today is a national holiday in the USA. I’m excusing myself from coding today. It’s going to be a glorious “do nothing” day - plenty of TV watching, crafting, and maybe even some video gaming.

More tomorrow, stay tuned…

Today I continued work on “Master Java Web Services and REST API with Spring Boot”; specifically Module 4 focusing on Spring Boot Web API development.

Additionally I worked on Leetcode problem #238 which asks us to return an array with the product of all the other numbers in the input array EXCEPT array[i]. The additional restrictions on this are “don’t use divide” and “complexity of O(n)”. If we can use division then this is almost trivial. The solution is to iterate over the input array twice - once from left to right (index 0 to array.length) and then again from right to left (array.length to 0). I never would have considered this. Every solution I came up with violated one or both of the restrictions.

More to come, stay tuned…

Today I completed this Qiskit Primitives walkthrough video. There is a whole lot of information here and I did my best to take notes. And I captured the code samples here as well. These aren’t going to be pertinent or relevant until next week when Qiskit Global Summer School (QGSS) starts.

Also, I continued this Spring Boot course on Coursera. The topic was dependency injection in Spring framework. I wrote a few classes to demonstrate how Spring manages dependencies with annotations like @Component and @Autowired. So far I’ve completed Modules 1 through 3. Tomorrow I look forward to working on Module 4 which is another introduction to Spring but focusing on Web API development.

Stay tuned…

Yesterday I thought I might either continue the Qiskit primitives walk-through or dive into a new Coursera Java-Spring course. Today I started “Master Java Web Services and REST API with Spring Boot”. Thankfully it’s not another guided project because their VNC is unfun.

This course starts by using the Spring initializer to download a fresh code project. The first module of this course is dependency injection with Spring framework. This is going well so far. I look forward to continuing this course.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to Qiskit primitives because Monday is coming fast and I don’t want to be behind before things start. Stay tuned…

Today I detoured away from quantum. I’m marketing myself for my next role as a Java engineer with Spring-Boot experience - and I am that. However, it’s been nine months since I last touched either professionally. And it behooves me to keep my skills sharp with extra training and exercises. So today I worked on a guided Spring-Boot project in Coursera, “Spring Boot with Embedded Database”. This project focuses on embedded databases, which I haven’t touched before; specifically H2. This went well and was pretty quick to complete. Unrelated to the code, I’m not sure I would take another guided project on Coursera. The VNC they use is well stocked with apps, but there were issues with the Eclipse version they installed there.

Tomorrow I may continue the Qiskit Primitives walk-through, or I may dive into another Coursera class. Stay tuned…

Last night I spent some time with Go for the first time. Special thanks to this repo. I have a Gitlab instance running in Docker on my Synology NAS. Most of the non-work commits I made were to that Gitlab instance. This repo copies commits from Gitlab over to Github so that commit activity can be consolidated in my public Github profile. Sweet, eh? As this was my first experience with Go I didn’t know what to expect but was very pleasantly surprised how east it is to read.

My adventure in quantum computing is trucking along. Today I made it through about half of this video. This covers IBM Qiskit Primitives, specifically Sampler primitives and Estimator primitives. The discussion was around how these are used to approach the IBM quantum platform. There are some good examples in here and I captured everything up to this point. I’m looking forward to finishing this tomorrow. Stay tuned…

#100DaysOfCode

As mentioned yesterday, the Qiskit Global Summer School 2025 is starting in about a week. And, as I’m not especially avid at quantum computing (yet), it would be beneficial to get comfortable around the Qiskit SDK before the July 7 start date. So today I worked on a very basic “Hello, World (but not)” tutorial presented on the Qiskit YouTube channel by Dr. Derek Wang.

For the most part, this went well. I understand about 80% of what is presented in the tutorial. However, things got hairy towards the end because the tutorial was filmed more than a year ago and IBM has upgraded/updated both their SDK and their quantum computing platform. So there were some issues matching the tutorial to today’s Qiskit version 2.x. I had to stop near the end when the API kept replying with something like “the system no longer accepts h circuits” and the “h” circuit is something that was pretty fundamental to the tutorial.

Anyway, it was a good starting point and good exercise. Tomorrow I’ll work through this lecture from last year’s summer school (QGSS 2024) with the updated SDK and changes to IBM’s “primitives”: Primitives on Qiskit v2. It’s an hour long presentation and it looks like there is plenty of coding opportunity too.

I have no roadmap for this pre-class week. I’m just going to play it by ear the next couple days and see how it shakes out. Stay tuned…

Here are some additional thoughts/notes on today’s exercise:

1. I’m familiar with the Python language as far as writing and manipulating functions, but have limited experience with managing packages and environments (venv vs conda?). And based on today’s work it seems that Python manages packages locally in a .venv directory similar to the way Node manages JavaScript packages in a node_modules directory. There is probably a way to similarly install Python packages globally, as can be done with Node, but I’ll save that for another exercise.

2. Qiskit SDK runs in Jupyter notebooks and I’m doing this from inside VS Code. To run the code chunks there is a requirement to select a “kernel”. I don’t know whether the kernel belongs to Jupyter or to Python or to both. I know Jupyter runs a server and I assume this is happening inside VS Code behind the scenes - probably one of the half-dozen “Code Plugin” process threads I can see in Activity Monitor.

3. All of this requires choosing a Python environment, and that is also still new to me. In the tutorial it looked like the presenter was using “conda” and in my setup I did not make a choice but ended up with “venv”. I don’t know how big of a difference this is because all of my code ran as well as the presenter’s, so does it matter?

4. There were a couple points in the tutorial where we were installing additional Python packages. After each install it was required to “restart the kernel” (the kernel again) and this is accomplished with VS Code command palette. This makes sense after having done it a couple times - the server, once it is running, has no knowledge of the new code and needs to be restarted to incorporate it. Forgive this exceptionally poor wording, it’s pretty late. But trust me - I understand it. The downside is that after restarting the kernel then I had to re-run all the code sections.

5. Some of the output of this exercise was plain text and would have benefited from a “pretty print” package and it looks like Python has that. I hope I can incorporate this into the exercise in the future. https://docs.python.org/3/library/pprint.html

Today’s problem was HackerRank again, Pattern Syntax Checker. It’s another regex problem. This time we’re tasked with finding out if a given string is a “valid” regular expression. This combines using Java Pattern and the PatternSyntaxException class imported from Java Util Regex. As mentioned previously, HackerRank requires the user to provide the code to pull in data from the console and in the past they pre-code the Java Scanner for this and so that’s what I’ve been using all this time. The Scanner class has a few options for “next” this or that. In a lot of these problems the first line of input is an integer to let the user know how many lines of text follow in the input. Java Scanner “nextInt()” returns this value successfully. However, today, I needed to use “nextLine()” for the subsequent lines of input and when combined with “nextInt()” for the first line, for some reason this was producing an empty string as the second line of text. When I switched this to “int n = Integer.parseint(sc.nextLine())” then the extra empty string suddenly disppeared. Yay.

Starting on Monday, July 7, and for the two weeks following, I will be participating in the IBM annual Qiskit Global Summer School (QGSS). Each year they focus on a different topic and this year is “The Past, Present, and Future of Quantum Computing”. I have registered for QGSS every year for the past five years but because I had a job at that time (and, some years, both a job and college) it was difficult to keep up with the material. I’m doing it right this year! Next week I’ll focus on the content from QGSS past years to - hopefully - get caught up and better familiarize myself with their SDK. I’m looking forward to this year and excited for the new content.

Stay tuned…

#100DaysOfCode