CS373 Spring 2021: Jack Raney (Week 9)

What did you do this week?

• This week was spent grinding out phase 2 of the project. I worked at least several hours each day since the middle of spring break on developing our backend. Things are finally coming together with the exception of a handful of elements.

What’s in your way?

• Right now, we need just a little bit of data from an api who has yet to validate our api key. What was supposed to take only “a few hours” to validate has now taken 3–4 days. This will be a fun problem to work around at the last minute

What will you do next week?

• Will continue to work on finishing phase 2. I imagine that even after Monday there will still be small details that need to be completed. I’ve also allowed work from other courses to pile up over the last week and so I will be redirecting my attention to those areas.

What did you think of the Interface Segregation Principle?

• I would have liked to have spent more time with the idea than I was able to. I appreciate the idea of trying to solve the unintended consequences around changing dependencies.

What was your experience of comprehensions, yield, closures, and decorators?

• Most of this was new to me. I really liked the idea of yields which allow for a kind of saving point to leave and return back to a function. Decorators caught me off guard. I see the value in having the ability to tack code onto a function, however I realize that I need to spend more time with the idea to fully grasp it.

What made you happy this week?

• Look, it was a rough week. I found more joy in taking 3pm naps after class on a few days than anything else.

Pick of the week?

• In the spirit of phase 2, I just wanted to say that Object Relational Mapping (ORM) is such a wonderful tool for database work. My group has used SQLAlchemy to manage interaction between our code and MySQL and it has worked great. It really simplifies SQL into a form that is much more familiar to programmers.