CS373 Spring 2021: Jack Raney (Week 10)

What did you do this week?

• This last week started rough and finished strong. Monday was a mad rush to finish phase two. My group was working on it right up until 10pm. We ended up finishing, and I’m quite proud of the functionality that we have. For much of the rest of the week, I caught up on some other courses which I had neglected the prior week. Towards the end of the week I found myself with extra time to rest and build up some energy. This weekend, my group met and got a plan together for phase three.

What’s in your way?

• There is very little in my way right now. As far as phase three is concerned, my group has a good idea of how we want to handle sorting and filtering. Searching is kind of the big sticking point right now. I imagine that that will be the most difficult part of this phase.

What will you do next week?

• This week I will work on implementing filtering and sorting to our API calls. I don’t expect this to be too bad. I also want to get ahead on much of my class work so that I can clear time to work on a personal project again.

What did you think of the Dependency Inversion Principle?

• I thought this reading really did a good job of explaining why abstractions are valuable in object oriented programming. I really appreciated the high level discussion of design. I found it valuable to define bad design with 3 simple points, Rigidity, Fragility, and Immobility. These are solid indicators that are easy and important to keep in mind. Lastly, building high level modules off of abstractions instead of direct reliance on particular low level modules is really efficient. This strategy allows us to not be reliant on new designs/changes. It also allows us to have reusable code that can work with and be wholly ignorant of new implementations of the abstraction.

What was your experience of +, *, ** and decorators?

• I found myself quite confused with the * and ** operators at first, but the exercise we did really helped me understand how to use them and under what conditions. The same goes for decorators.

What made you happy this week?

• I was finally able to sign up to get my vaccine. I’ll be getting my first shot on Tuesday of this upcoming week. Its exciting to finally have a timeframe for when I can expect some semblance of normalcy in my life.

Tip of the week?

• My tip of the week is a strategy that I use during chaotic weeks. When there is a lot that needs to be done, I find it best to sit down and write out every single thing that needs to be done. Alongside each entry in that list, I mark down when it needs to be done by. I then make another list with every entry, but this final list is sorted by when I plan on doing each bit of work. It allows me to organize a plan for how to get everything done. It stops me from getting into situations where I have more work to do than I anticipated and less time to do it than I’d hoped.
• Last tip: when making this list, plan to do things earlier than you need to. The list will ensure that you do most things at your planned date/time, but there will be times where you fail to complete everything. If you don’t cram your todo list, it will allow you to recover from days where you miss the target.