Week Five: This Is Not The One You’ve Been Waiting For
Greetings friend, Grant He here. Hope you’re having a wonderful weekend, and welcome back to my weekly update on Professor Downing’s Software Engineering class. This is week five, so we should all know the drill by now: there are questions and here are my responses. My team is having an all-hands-on-deck meeting in a bit, so this post should be short and sweet. Without further ado, let’s just jump into it.
What did you do this past week?
I’m the kind of person who starts working on a project as soon as it’s assigned, but the obvious problem with this approach in group projects is that it’s unfair to the rest of the team how I’ve decided to work on implementing a feature or resolving an issue without their input. In order to avoid this problem, I redesigned my software engineering methodology for the IDB project. I still spent a lot of time individually tinkering with React to spruce up my skills for the inevitable frontend work, but I figured that I could track GitLab issues and assign them to project members (sanctioned by my being the project lead) so that there is greater pressure to perform well in one’s separate assigned tasks. Early on I found out that my group had a huge deficit in frontend talent. We had someone who had used Flask before, but no one had any real life React experience. The team’s original plan was to have two frontend and three backend engineers, but after learning about the prior skill distribution, Sujoy Purkayastha volunteered to work on frontend for the time being. This will be a major help. Also, I know that I predicted that the website would be deployed by the time of this post but frankly I also had not expected the amount of planning that is required to go into such a seemingly simple task. I promise that this detail will be accomplished today.
What’s in your way?
The biggest hurdle I am facing right now is getting team members on the same page. I recognize that all computer science students lead very busy lives, but some members need to respond to the pings in Slack. I’m serious lol. You know who you are. 👁️
What will you do next week?
Over this past week, I have started to notice some deadlines come crashing toward me despite my previous assumption that I was doing well by putting my best effort to handle them ahead of time. I have a virtualization lab due tonight, the first IDB checkpoint due next Wednesday, several interviews over the next week, and a convolutional neural network project due next Sunday. I feel blessed to be taking such incredible courses at UT Austin, yet the major difficulty to taking only project-based computer science classes, i.e. being vigilant with time/project management, is rearing its head this upcoming week. For software engineering in particular, the work is tightening and I expect the coding sprint ahead of the deadline to be imminent.
What was your experience of types, object models, and iterators?
The lecture material over types has mostly been data structures review in my opinion. Pretty intuitive stuff.
Once again, object models and their properties have close analogies to other object models in Java, with some notable differences in instance and class variables. No big deal.
Iterators in Python are similar to Iterators in Java. Once again, everything that I’ve come across about iterators makes sense.
What made you happy this week?
What made me most happy this week was talking to my family and friends. I had a long conversation with my parents that helped me recalibrate my goals and work ethic. As a result, this has been the most motivated weekend I’ve experienced in a long time. Maybe this has been more existentially satisfying than happy per se, but the amount of tasks I’ve accomplished this week has me feeling amazing. Excelsior!
Also, I found a new favorite music release of the year: Illuminati Hotties’ eclectic, playful, and deeply sarcastic Free I.H. mixtape. Can rock music even be considered for a mixtape? Who cares — punk is alive! 😄 The way that certified banger™ content//bedtime evolves instrumentally is nothing short of mind-blowing.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I was playing around with GitLab Issues this past week, and I found several nifty features that accompany issue tracking. These are a few that caught my eye with their usefulness:
- Milestones are a way to track issues to achieve a broader goal in a certain period of time. My group is using milestones to group the issues of a phase together.
- Time tracking allows the team to add an estimate of the amount of time needed to complete an issue and record the actual time spent working on it. Because Professor Downing requires teams to keep track of each member’s estimated and actual completion times, this feature could be harnessed for facilitating this purpose.
- Related issues create bi-directional relationships between any two issues and appear in a block below the issue description. This feature can be used to group issues that are dependent on each other.
There are tons of other cool issue features in GitLab that I didn’t mention, such as the exporting issues to CSV and burndown charts. For more information on issue features in GitLab, I encourage you to check out the documentation here.
And that’s it for now! Join me next week. Or not. Who cares at this point? Let’s get the projects completed!
