CS343: Blog #12
- What did you do this past week?
This past school week, I worked a lot to wrap up Phase 3 of the project!
It was a lot of fun — I got to work a lot on the front end, a skill that desperately needed some work.
It’s slow and steady, but I feel like I’m improving. Which is super cool (design vision could definitely still use some work, but hey, one step at a time).
In addition, this weekend was a ton of fun!
For the first time in a while, I went out and just sent it on Friday — my friends and I went to Greenlight Social, tried to go to Bufords (didn’t get in b/c the line was way too long), and ended up at The Ranch. It was a while since I went out like that, and it was a good reminder of what life should be like.
My goal is to make every weekend of my last semester of college like that. No ragrets.
2. What’s in your way?
Unfortunately, I’m still ironing out some of the CI/CD stuff for the project. I need to get the backend Python unit tests working, and the Selenium tests are still giving me trouble (I’ve come up with a couple of ideas to get them working).
Other than that, life is good! This past weekend, I’ve really come to realize what’s important these last couple of weeks of college.
3. What will you do next week?
I will try keep working on the CI pipeline and get it working! I really hope that these last couple of ideas that I have will do the trick and get it working.
Hopefully.
Other than that, I’ll be chilling. I’m hoping to get to Zilker and go outside more to play some Spikeball. I think I’m also going to go float the river next weekend. Should be a lot of fun.
4. If you read it, what did you think of the More getters and setters?
I thought it made good points and introduced some good design patterns (i.e. the Builder pattern). I’ve seen the Builder pattern before in one of my past internships, and I thought it worked very well.
My one problem with the article is that it failed to address the shortcoming and arguments against the builder pattern and these proposed solutions against the getter/setter design pattern (or anti-pattern, if you buy the article’s argument).
I think it’s pretty ironic that the one problem I had with this article is that they didn’t address the potential downsides of the Builder pattern, as they made sure to mention specifically in the last article that every pattern has potential upsides and downsides, and made it seem like they were objective and unbiased writers of good software engineering practices.
Looks like none of us are perfect (but we already knew that).
5. What was your experience of SQL? (this question will vary, week to week)
It was cool! It was great learning some of the inner working of SQL, and how some of the calls were being made under the hood of an ORM like SQLAlchemy.
I don’t think I will be personally writing SQL any time soon, but it’s a good fundamental understanding to have (probably will help us avoid writing some horrible and inefficient ORM SQL queries in the future).
I also learned about a lot of SQL key words that I didn’t know about before (like like and between)!
6. What made you happy this week?
I really just enjoyed going out to West 6th this weekend (both with my friends, and one of my best friend’s birthday).
Like I mentioned before, it reminded me of what’s really important these last couple of weeks college.
To be honest, who really cares about school. Don’t get me wrong — school is important, and I enjoy learning what I’m interested in. But more important than that these last couple of weeks is the friendships that will (hopefully) last a lifetime. I love my friends, and I can’t wait to spend these last couple of weeks of college with them living it up.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Use Splintr for Python Selenium GUI tests!
It’s a great library that abstracts away some of the lower level and unsavory parts of Selenium. It makes it a very high level syntax to interact with the browser and create E2E GUI tests.
