CS 373 Fall 2019 Week 10: William Wang

What did you do this past week?
This past week my group met up to review our progress from the previous phase as well as establish what our plans are moving forward. Phase II was especially stressful for my group as we had multiple deadlines and little knowledge over how to implement the features required for that phase. Having learned from this experience, we now plan to start working much earlier so we’re not as crunched for time. This time, I was personally assigned with managing the existing EBS infrastructure (deploying the latest version of the website and Flask application) as well as implementing the search/filtering functionality in React. The majority of my time this week has been spent catching up on coding challenges that I’ve been putting off, but I will begin working on Phase III tasks tomorrow.
What’s in your way?
The upcoming week will be especially hectic for me, similar to what happened in Phase II. Besides the project deadline on Thursday, I also have an essay and another coding project due the same night. Throughout the week I will also be working on completing other assignments and coding challenges so it will really be a test of my time management skills to balance all of these priorities at once. We shall see if I am ultimately able to get everything done on time.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I am planning to get all of my other deadlines out of the way in advance so I can focus on Phase III tasks during the week. Because one of my tasks is implementing the search and filtering functionality, I will need to look into how to go about doing this before I get started. I’ve been told it is fairly straightforward since we are using React Tables and a lot of the functionality is already built in. Apart from this, I will also need to containerize our backend using Docker such that we can run our continuous integration pipelines and enable testing.
What was your experience of SQL?
I have had some brief exposure to SQL from a Modern Web Apps course I took last year, so I was already familiar with some of the keywords. The different types of joins, however, were fairly new to me and it took me some time to understand how to use them to query specific data attributes. I anticipate that there will probably be several SQL query on the next exam so it would be wise to learn them now and understand them prior to being tested over them.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Be sure to test your local changes before pushing to the master branch of your Git repository. It saves a lot of time and trouble for your teammates if you figure out that your changes are not working properly, before someone else has to find out that the application has broken. Not speaking out of angst, just hoping to pass on some wisdom.
