CS3216: Third week — SPARTA
The third week has passed for CS3216… THIS IS SPARTA!!! is exactly what can describe what we’re going through right now.
Having 5 concurrent projects spreading across the different modules is definitely not funny and not to mention Assignment 3 from CS3216 is about to start so that’s gonna make it 6 concurrent projects in no time ☺ Sometimes, I think, remembering which project and who you’re doing the project with is harder than the requirements of the different projects.
It’s not how you fall, it’s how you pick yourself up!
In the previous blog post, we mentioned how Facebook’s change in their Open Graph’s API caused our group to had to pivot our idea. Somehow, in an awesome fashion, Facebook’s spiders algorithm managed to mark our site as malicious or abusive right after we generated a new app and used it as our Facebook app’s URL. This led to us going round in circles trying to get our URL to be unmarked as malicious or abusive (it’s just a skeleton app! Come on! How can it be malicious or abusive?!) and found out to our dismay that the algorithm is automatic and there is no real channel of manual override. Furthermore, exactly how sites are marked is kept secret as well… Right, so right after the Open Graph API screwed us over, Facebook’s algorithm somehow managed to detect that they should screw us over again. Needless to say, this event managed to slow us down by 1–2 days even after our need to pivot. At that time, we were desperately in need for speed.
Right after we decided to give up on the previous url and pick a new one since we couldn’t, for the sake of our lives and the project wrestle and win over Facebook’s algorithm (after trying out several strategies that people have employed and succeeded or otherwise online), the teaching staff decided to test our app (hooray!). And well, of course, in the midst of the chaos of wrestling with Facebook and trying to get our app up and running, we have totally forgotten to change the URL of our website on the wiki page and thus caused the teaching staff to test the totally broken app. Wait, it’s malicious or abusive… right?
And, because of that, we managed to get exactly the feedback that we though we’d get if that app was tested. Broken — a.k.a none of the functionalities work, it was a skeleton app that does nothing and yet it’s malicious or abusive. It’s our own mistake for forgetting to update but hey, we’ve met so many unprecedented bumps that I think what matters is that we pick ourselves up.
I can only hope, that we are able to complete the app’s functionalities and push it live by tonight, or worst case tomorrow.
I think our speed after having met multiple extreme bumps along the way is satisfactory but it could definitely be better. One of the hardest parts of doing projects, I feel — and in general, is the part of handling people.
In any case, it seems that we’ve just found out another thing about Facebook in that it has made even more changes to their API, there is no longer a function to have that pesky pop-up to invite friends to an app unless the app is a gaming app, hooray for us and boo for us. Hooray because no more weird app notifications from the hundreds of friends. Boo because now the only way for users to invite people to apps that they found is interesting is through tagging them using the “share” button.
Facebook, why you keep changing your APIs so extensively? whyyyyyy???
On a happier note, Assignment 2 was hella fun and it was also kind of a relax thing compared to Assignment 1! Assignment 1 is a total giant compared to Assignment 2 ya? But… even though Assignment 2 is drawing to a close soon... CS3216 is plain evil in the sense that Assignment 3 is right up the corner! SPARTA!!!
It is also interesting to note that I’ll be presenting my group’s seminar on Monday for Assignment 2 and I definitely hope not to screw up since the other guys in my group put it a lot of effort in their write up for the seminar as well as for making the slides.
This week’s blog post is probably a bit off tangent, odd and a little short but that’s fine, there’s too many deadlines to hit and the other modules are yearning for some attention. Sleep is almost === optional at the moment… which means that brain !== functioning properly. Hopefully by next week the brain will be functioning much more properly without meeting all the odd quirks of having to leverage so heavily on Facebook when they change their API all too often. Oh and of course having to go through the ordeal of being marked as malicious or abusive, now that’s just tough luck.
See you at the seminar tomorrow and I hope that the remaining days before the Assignment 1 due date will be kind on us so that our brain can then function normally once again for the upcoming CS3216 Final Project!☺ Oh I forgot, for Assignment 3 too, I kinda jumped the gun here but hey, Final Project is important too!