CS373 Fall 2020: Week 8

What Did I Do This Week?

This week, I contemplated my existence and questioned the purpose of higher education after being bombarded with three exams — one of them being an extremely difficult take-home NLP test.

With regard to SWE, I mostly continued scraping for data and prepared the data I had on hand for migration into our Postgres database.

What Is In My Way?

Nothing right now. It’s just a matter of coordinating with other members to finish the user stories and the requirements for phase II. The exams this week through a wrench in our schedule, so crunch time will be required to finish this out.

What Will I Do Next Week?

I will help finish the back-end after getting my wisdom teeth taken out. We’ll plan out where to go starting at phase three. And given that our site is about elections, we will presumably also be preparing to update our data for election day (or week/month depending on how fast Texas counts its ballots).

Thoughts on The Liskov Substitution Principle?

The article covered a lot of crucial points with regard to Object Oriented design. Just like the main theme of The Open Closed Principle, the Liskov Substitution Principle touches on the fact that real world object-model relationships don’t always translate well to code. Therefore, OOD is more than just recognizing real world relationships, but rather seeing how they can be implemented given the constraints of the language.

Thoughts on Test #1?

Test #1 wasn’t that bad. Problem #1 on both exam days gave a me some trouble and created some gacky code out of me, but the rest was surprisingly easy. Being able to work on the problems with the rest of my group was great as well because it gave us time to reflect on the solutions with each other while roasting each other’s code. Though I’m a bit nervous on how doable the test was, I’m ultimately relieved that Prof. Downing didn’t throw us a curve ball this time.

What Made Me Happy This Week?

I voted in my first general election! I’m currently in Belton, TX, a suburb of 22,000, and I stood in line for 2 hours from 8:30–10:30. While the waiting wasn’t fun and while the voting line wasn’t the best place to watch a Zoom lecture, it’s definitely rewarding getting to take part in democracy given the chaotic environment of American politics.

Tip-Of-The-Week?

If command-line git still frustrates you, and you don’t like the idea of using VSCode’s git integration, then I found that SourceTree by Atlassian is a super comprehensive GUI git interface for beginners and experts alike! While I don’t use it myself, I can see its purpose and its advantages it has.