CS373 Spring 2022: Cole Weinman — Week 14

What did you do this week?

Early this week I drove back to Austin and wrapped up the big part of my classical mythology product. Later in the week, I focused on refactoring and implementing user stories for the IDB project. I made a lot of our front-end code cleaner by making separate components for commonly used code. I also worked to improve the user experience with sorting and pagination.

What’s in your way?

I still do not feel like I have enough time to study for upcoming exams or complete projects with the quality that I would like. I am also feeling very burnt out at the end of the semester. I’m very much looking forward to next week when I am done with classes.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will first focus on my algorithms exam. Then I will work to finish the IDB project along with studying for my marketing exam on Friday. With the IDB project, we need to create our presentation and wrap up our visualizations.

What did you think of Paper #14: The New Methodology?

I really enjoyed the paper on agile methodology. I think understanding these methodologies is really important for going into the software development industry. I think agile is great because it allows for iterative development and constant feedback regarding the product under development. However, the paper was over fifteen years old so I would want to read something more recent since I know agile has evolved since then in many ways.

What was your experience of refactoring?

I enjoyed learning about the best ways to refactor in an object-oriented environment. I am curious how this best applies to things like front-end frameworks where objects are normally just data models with the work done elsewhere.

What made you happy this week?

This week went by very fast but I was able to attend a banquet on Tuesday which was very fun and I started to get communications for the summer internship which was exciting. I hope that it will be a good experience and that I enjoy the work.

What is your tip-of-the-week?

My tip of the week has to do with refactoring in React. Try to reduce duplicated layout code by creating components for them. This lets you make changes much faster because you don’t have to change the component in multiple places. It also makes the code for each page much smaller and easier to understand. For our project, I created a handful of common components used across many of our pages and it is so much easier to make changes now.