What did you do this past week?
This past week has been very busy. Especially for this course, we just started on a brand new project that will last until the end of this course.
All the teams need to submit their proposal on a first come first serve basis. After being assigned to a team, we decided our first goal is to finish our proposal before the weekend. By looking at our current progress, we were able to submit an approved proposal before our proposed deadline. Our team members had some schedule conflicts so we had to write our own proposals separately. We determined the best proposal together yesterday and filled out all the questions on the Request-For-Proposal. Fortunately, we received approval yesterday and we are on track with our progress.
For my other courses, I started to work with AWS for my data management course. I think the knowledge in AWS can be applied to my software engineering project as well so I am glad I chose to take that course.
What’s in your way?
I think one issue with my team right now is the scheduling conflicts. I am not sure CATME was a great tool for assembling teams. Although people were instructed to fill out when they are not free to work, I think people do not really have an idea of when they are unable to work. For example, although someone usually gets coffee at 3 p.m. in the afternoon, he wouldn’t considered it as “unable to work” because this is his free time. He would not mark it on CATME but when the team is decided to schedule a meeting at 3, he is going to say no. Likewise, although people may consider any time after dinner to be free, most people do not want to work during those hours. They may not mark them as busy on CATME, but they are unable to work. I think the better alternative is to have people fill out when they are willing to work. Most people have a better idea of when they want to work. It is much easier for someone to figure out when they want to work than considering coffee breaks as an “occupied” time. Furthermore, exceptions comes up very often and I do not think we are able to predict exceptions. Thus, I think we should not be using CATME for team assembly. Apart from that complaint, I do not have any obstacles in my way.
What will you do next week?
Next week, my team will start implementing phase one of the project. We will divide tasks to each member and then start with our API designs. None of us has experiences with Postman so I believe that is where we will start.
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #5: Pair Programming?
I think pair programming is an interesting and effective practice to expedite development cycles for many circumstances. I believe it should be practiced by more companies. I believe it would also help us on this project.
What was your experience of Python’s object model, list, tuple, set, dict, and iterators? (this question will vary, week to week)
I have used some of these Python features before but I don’t think I have actually dig into specifics of them. I assumed they were similar to those in Java but from the bombing the quizzes this past week, I should revisit their implementations and other specifics.
What made you happy this week?
I’m really happy about my course choices and having the proposal approved.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Since we will start working with git for our project. I think we need to get the version control system correct before we start making any commits.