CS373 Fall 2022: Max Thomas
What did you do this past week? This past week, I attended class all 3 days and took the quizzes. On Monday, we began a new topic of refactoring in Java and continued that on Wednesday. I also worked on my IDB project for phase 3. I am in charge of the data and most of the miscellaneous issues. I spent the week working on cleaning up the data to reduce the number of NULL values and include a few new fields. In my other classes, I studied and took a Machine Learning exam.
What’s in your way? I am just waiting to upload the new data to the database once the grading is complete. We only have one database, so any new fields I upload would risk breaking the production site. However, I had coordinated with our backend developers and gave them the new fields to expect, so they are also able to start developing in anticipation of those fields being added.
What will you do next week? Next week, I will upload the new data to our database as well as finish up all my miscellaneous issues for Phase 3, including the technical report. I also plan to attend class all 3 days as well. Once Phase 3 is complete, I will have to switch gears to my Machine Learning class, as I have a final project due in a week.
What did you think of Paper #12. Why extends is evil? I completely agree with the idea. This seems to be an extension of the getters/setters is evil that we read last week. Similar to how getters and setters would allow other classes to depend on implementation details of a class thus making the class very hard to refactor without breaking those other classes, so does extending a class create the same kind of relationship. It's interesting to consider how this would work in a language like Python where there are no interfaces. Perhaps the solution is to not use Python when creating complex classes.
What was your experience of the refactoring, UML, and ethics talk? (this question will vary, week to week) I found the refactoring to be fairly useful, but it seems to be more of an exercise that we are walking through a solution to rather than material we can take notes on. UML is just another benefecial tool, but we didn’t go into much depth. The ethics talk was quite interesting and made me happy with my decision to take contemporary issues next spring.
What made you happy this week? I am so happy that it got properly cold this week. While some people may not be a fan of the cold, I would argue that its better than the semi-cold weather we’ve had the past few weeks. At the very least, I can properly wear winter clothes now.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week? My pick-of-the-week is the Object Oriented programming class to take. I took it last semester and thoroughly enjoyed the material. This class is structured almost exactly like this one (except in C++ vs Python), but the projects are independent of each other and can be worked on independently. If you found the learning structure of this class to be benefecial for you, I would highly recommend OOP.
