CS373 Spring 2022: Cole Weinman — Week 9
What did you do this week?
At the beginning of this week, I spent most of my time studying for my algorithms exam that was on Wednesday. It was rough, to put it mildly, but it could have been worse. The second half of the week I updated the about page and worked on the backend for the IDB project. My group reworked some of our design for the API so I also updated the Postman documentation. I also attended the third programming contest on Friday which was fun.
What’s in your way?
This week the severe weather got in my way because it added a lot of stress to the day I needed to be studying and working hard on the project. Also, I didn’t sleep well this week which was a drag on my productivity later in the week. Overall I think I could have been a lot more productive and with more sleep and motivation I hope to do more next week.
What will you do next week?
Next week I will finish up phase 2 of the IDB project by finishing the frontend and the Postman tests. I hope it will not take too long but I have yet to start working on the Postman tests. I will also be studying for my marketing exam on Friday and my Mom will be visiting next weekend so I will be working a bit extra during the week to make time for that.
What did you think of Paper #9: Dependency Inversion Principle?
The Dependency Inversion Principle was much easier for me to understand than the prior principles of SOLID design. I related this principle to some of my own software projects where I wrote code that is completely dependent on one platform where it could be abstracted via an interface so that it could be expanded in the future to work with more platforms. I think it’s easy to implement this in terms of one monolith application, but it gets a little tricky when you’re talking about applications with many pieces, like cloud applications that use many different services and tools.
What was your experience of decorators, Cache, and functions?
I found decorators to be a very cool aspect of Python. They would be very helpful for testing and caching values. The cache use case is particularly interesting, especially when the return values for functions don’t change.
What made you happy this week?
I went canoeing this weekend with some friends which was fun. It finally warmed up which made it the perfect time to go. I needed some nature therapy in my life and this was it. It was very relaxing and enjoyable.
What is your tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is Chrome dev tools. I know many people know to use this for checking the console of a website, but you can also use it to modify CSS on the fly. I use this for working on the front end of the IDB project and messing with the CSS live helps me figure out exactly the styling that I need for the app, without having to constantly rebuild it. You can also view network requests on it to see all the calls to get images or to APIs including the request sent and the response received.
