Week Eleven: The Past Is a Corridor
You know the drill. Hit it.
What did you do this past week?
The big accomplishment of the past week was completing Phase Three of the IDB project. My group decided to do the searching, sorting, filtering functionality on the client side (as opposed to server side). This meant that the frontend team, which I’m on, had a lot on our hands this week. To improve on our performance as a team from the last phase, this time I defined mini milestones that we needed to reach at certain dates, in terms of desired and required website features. By Monday we completed sitewide searching, filtering, and sorting; by Wednesday we refined frontend component unit tests and GUI tests; and with an extended deadline, on Thursday we successfully got Selenium tests running on GitLab CI and reformatted the files to conform to the Points Off Guide.
What’s in your way?
Not much. The most important thing that’s on my mind right now is the set of upcoming internship interviews that I’ll spend time preparing for. For this class I’ll spend an afternoon or so refactoring the frontend code base and fixing any issues that crop up from the Phase Three grading.
What will you do next week?
I’ll probably get to relax a lot more next week. I already mentioned some of the items on my agenda; beyond those, I’ll get cracking on my virtualization project (implementing host-level IPC hypercalls) and neural networks homework (training a CNN to do vision-based driving).
If you read it, what did you think of The Dependency Inversion Principle?
The Dependency Inversion Principle states:
- High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions, e.g. interfaces.
- Abstractions should not depend on details. Details, i.e. concrete implementations, should depend on abstractions.
I personally thought that the arguments that the author makes in favor of the Dependency Inversion Principle, i.e. to avoid the rigidity, fragility, and immobility, of one’s system when violating the principle, to be really strong.
What was your experience of relational algebra in Python?
I thought that learning relational algebra in Python served as a nice transition from Python to SQL, which seems to be coming up in the lectures next week. Relations can be represented in Python dictionaries and the implementations of project, select, cross join, theta join, and natural join involve iterating through the relations and/or the keys of a relation and checking to make sure the element or pair of elements follows a specified predicate. Overall the relational algebra material that’s been introduced thus far haven’t been too difficult to capture.
What made you happy this week?
I’m happy that I was very productive and efficient with my time this week. I look forward to chilling this weekend. Also having been a fan of Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher, currently my favorite album of the year, I finally listened through her haunting debut album Stranger in the Alps. It’s a remarkable release that alchemizes sorrow into redemptive beauty.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is GitLab CI/CD environment variables. My group is using this to store and protect our AWS keys and other confidential information, so that they’re not exposed when building the CI pipeline. Find out more here.
And that’s it for now. I’ll see you next week!
