Week Four: T-Minus ? Till Liftoff
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 four, so we should all know the drill by now: there are questions and here are my responses. So without further ado, let’s just jump into it.
What did you do this past week?
One of the interesting aspects of my current fall semester is the fact that all of my computer science courses (Software Engineering, Virtualization, and Neural Networks) are maximally weighted toward projects. My big achievements of this past week were getting my project groups established, setting up communication channels, and meeting virtually with all of my team members at least once. These actions allow the group to efficiently become familiarized with one another’s schedules, work out each person’s technical roles, and set its sights on making tangible progress in the near future. My IDB project group has created a Slack channel and connected the Git repository to it. We also agreed upon developing an application that harnesses geographical, botanical, and nutritional data to aid users with recommendations for urban farming resources based on the principles of mutual aid. Thankfully teammate Jonathan Randall posted our request for proposal as soon as we decided on this idea, because another group with a very similar project idea posted its request for proposal ten minutes after ours.
What’s in your way?
Despite all of the progress in my schoolwork, admittedly it’s been a draining week for me — as weeks in fall semesters often are. It’s a weird psychological phenomenon: I know that I have the ball rolling in the right direction, that the concentrated momentum is working in my favor, but I’m still operating under a near-constant state of concern due to the quantity of actionable events that I have to process. Even when I’m relaxing, I feel the urge to be doing something else. I might just be a workaholic. 😩
What will you do next week?
During my IDB project group’s first video call, I chose to work on the front-end of the application. For the upcoming week, I plan on developing a beautiful website using React and Bootstrap. Also, in non-class-related news, the Technology & Science Career Fair is being held on Wednesday and Thursday, and I will be attending that. Best of luck to everyone doing the same thing.
What was your experience of exceptions, IDB1, and types?
Having used exceptions and types before, I wasn’t especially caught off guard with any introduced information. Nevertheless, here are a few things about Python from the last week of lectures that I found interesting:
- Exceptions follow type inheritance, and one must be careful of such rules when catching exceptions.
- The type of a type is a type, including the type of type.
- Complex numbers (i.e. complex) are supported.
- Append an r before quotation marks to create a raw string.
- Only immutable/hashable objects, e.g. int, float, str, frozenset, can go into a set. Also, the size of a set can be modified but not the content.
And in regards to IDB1, my group has been very proactive. The folks who were proficient in back-end were ready to move the needle forward, and because the group had a gap in front-end experience, I elected myself to fill that gap. I am prepared to put in the effort to make this work.
What made you happy this week?
This is going to be a funny one to admit, but getting cold-called and not tripping over one of Professor Downing’s questions made me happy this week. When class was nearing its end on Friday, I was prepared to have another week of worrying when I was going to be called. Then, out of the blue, I heard “Grant He”. Uh oh. Professor Downing and I went over types in Python, specifically sets and its properties. Everything went fine. Now maybe I can chillax during the lectures for the next week. So it goes.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
What I have this week isn’t really a pick or a tip but an article related to network security. The recently discovered Zerologon vulnerability, which could allow an attacker to take control of any or all computers on a network running on server versions of Microsoft Windows by sending in a string of zeros, was rated “critical” by Windows and the maximum 10.0 in severity by CVSS. This is obviously an extremely serious exploit, and goes to show how software developers can never be too careful in implementing protections against malicious attacks. The network security landscape is and most likely will never be fully secure, even in the matter of something as supposedly well tested as Windows servers.
More information can be found here.
And that’s it for now! Join me next week as I talk about the progress that my project group makes. Hopefully we will have the website up and running by then.
