CS 373 Spring 2021 Week 7: Joseph Graham
- What did you do this past week?
My group and I have been hard at work making progress on Phase 1 for our database project. Another partner and I worked on getting most of the backend done as well as the postman documentation. The others in our group are hard at work getting the front end done for this phase.
2. What’s in your way?
We had a huge setback this week because we realized for our original project (a fitness database) we wouldn’t be able to use an Amazon API to list different equipment without being some sort of authorized seller. We tried using different shopping APIs, then refactoring our project to fit a different model, both to no luck. We decided the only thing we could do was create a new proposal from scratch. It took a while to come up, but we eventually got something we like, which is tracking air pollution across the world.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week we will probably try to get ahead on the next phase because I’m sure no one wants to be working much on the project during spring break.
4. If you read it, what did you think of the Open-Closed Principle?
I thought this was really interesting because I had never really known that much about why we design object-oriented programs to be open-closed. It was one of those things that I just accepted you needed to do. But after reading, it now makes way more sense. It’s integral that programs are designed this way so you aren’t refactoring code constantly, but instead adding to already working code. This makes it much more future-proof and less prone to things breaking when adding new functionality.
5. What was your experience of iterators and reduce2? (this question will vary, week to week)
Learning about iterators helped me understand much better what happens in a for loop in python. What kind of blew my mind that took me a minute to understand, is how you can get an iterator from an iterator, and why that is even practical. Reduce 2 wasn’t too bad, my zoom breakout group and I were able to figure it out without any issues. Professor Downing came in to check how we were doing and pointed out how we could make the code much cleaner and get rid of redundancy.
6. What made you happy this week?
What made me happy this week was successfully switching our database to a completely new model with little hiccups along the way. I was a little terrified that changing the domain for AWS was going to completely break it, with how much trouble other groups are having with getting AWS to work in the first place. With everything almost done at the point of writing this, it is a huge relief.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week is to watch the API and Postman Lecture video in the files section under canvas. If you are working on the backend and haven’t used Postman before, it is a great introduction video explaining how to use it.