CS373 Fall 2019 Week 10: Justin Zhang

What did you do this past week?
This past week, I was thinking a lot about the project any how it could be better organized. After receiving the feedback for Phase II, I now realize that our project is not exactly what the spec has defined; however, projects in software engineering do flex and change, but the principles should stay the same. In Phase II, I believe that we were not following proper software engineering principles. I created some user stories on GitLab; I hope that they aren’t too difficult to implement. I am working on the technical report, making it more clear and including the right information. I also wrote tests for the API in Postman, though I’m not sure if the tests are testing the RESTful API properly.
What’s in your way?
Documentation is still a problem. Communication between team members on how the parts fit together is lacking, but I hope to remedy that this week. I also think my time efficiency has been at an all-time low recently, so hopefully I can improve upon that.
What will you do next week?
This week, I’ll be using GitLab more and more as the main source for development. I believe that GitLab and the technical report will be the two main points of access for developing and understanding the project. I hope to clear up definitions and terms with the team and what the specific functions of each technology is. I also plan on writing a few tests for parts of the code with unittest/Mocha specifically.
What was your experience of SQL? (this question will vary, week to week)
I enjoyed going through SQL. In class, we mainly learned about the syntax and how it can be used to make queries from a SQL table. SQL is useful for querying data from tables, and it’s important to emphasize that the tables are what contain the data.
I used MySQL this past summer at Roku, so I was already a little familiar with the language and what it could do/what it is used for.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of the week is https://bower.io/
I was searching the web for something that could manage all the different full stack technologies and came across this. It’s a package manager for frontend development tools. It keeps track of packages and keeps them up-to-date. I don’t have any experience with using bower, but it seems worth looking into.
Until next week!
Justin