CS373 Spring 2022: Sanchith Shanmuga

Blog #14

What did you do this past week?

This past week I worked on wrapping up parts of phase 4 for the group project, including formatting code, preparing our live presentation, and working on our team’s visualizations.

What’s in your way?

The only thing in our way this week is completing all of our visualizations and presenting our project. Our presentation will likely occur tomorrow in class. On top of this class, I have a few projects and exams in other classes as this is the last week of classes for the semester.

What will you do next week?

This next week, my group plans on wrapping up phase 4 of the group project and this mainly involves formatting some code and getting our visualizations working.

What did you think of Paper #14: The New Methodology?

The biggest takeaway I had from this paper was that change is consistent throughout software development. In fact, this is the theme I am seeing throughout all of the papers this semester. As a result, when we write code and when we plan code, we must accommodate change. Thus, that is why this week’s paper highlights the benefits of agile development, a process welcoming of change.

What was your experience of refactoring.? (this question will vary, week to week)

This past week, I was glad to learn refactoring in greater detail, as we began to touch concepts that were new to me. It is always nice to learn something new, especially interesting content like this. Fowler’s concepts are something new to me, even though general refactoring is not, so it was interesting to understand Fowler’s take on how to approach things. However, what is unique about this is that the whole process is subjective, which is something not usually encountered when programming.

What made you happy this week?

I was happy to travel back home and visit my family this last week. I was sick, so it was nice to be able to recover in the comfort of my home. I also got to spend a lot of time with my family and hometown friends this weekend, so that was refreshing.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My tip-of-the-week is to always read and heavily reference API/documentation when trying to use a new software. Oftentimes, just spending the first 15 minutes understanding the documentation behind the code you need to write can make the code writing process so much smoother and faster. This is something I learned to appreciate the more I began software development.