CS373: Blog 4
- What did you do this past week?
I finally got out of quarantine!
It felt great not having to worry about infecting anyone or getting infected by roommates — something about having to wear a mask around my apartment constantly was really wearing me down.
Other than that, I boxed a lot and hung out with my friends.
All in all, it’s good to be back.
2. What’s in your way?
This winter storm.
No, seriously.
Just as I get out of quarantine and am ready to enjoy the great outdoors again, this massive winter storm comes in and ruins everything!
It’s really not that bad for me — I know it’ll pass in a couple of days.
But I’d really prefer to be outside at Zilker instead of boxed up in my apartment shivering.
3. What will you do next week?
I want to box, hang out with my friends, and train for my Everest hike.
Maybe I’ll do some school work too.
4. If you read it, what did you think of the Pair Programming?
I definitely didn’t agree with all the points, but I thought it was very interesting.
Seeing a perspective on software development best practices from a different era (circa 2000) is super interesting, as so much has changed since then.
Don’t get me wrong, I love pair programming.
It makes programming much more communicative and social.
I also love it when you are working on a particularly hard or complex problem.
However, the way the essay frames it seems dogmatic — I don’t think pair programming is the end all be all magical cure for all of software development.
I think there’s limitations to it (e.g. having to rely on some one all the time where solo programming would function better and more effectively).
It also seems like this essay was written before CI and code reviews became common practice.
I really wonder if the writer of the essay would feel so strongly about pair programming given today’s common software development techniques.
5. What was your experience of types? (this question will vary, week to week)
Great!
I’m newer to Python, so it was cool to get a crash course on the main types I might see and use this upcoming semester.
For the most part, the types I saw in Python are pretty much analogous to the types I’ve seen in other languages (although there are some new nuances to remember).
6. What made you happy this week?
Boxing!
I missed hitting the bags and sparring while I was in isolation, and it felt great to get back into the gym.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Super random, but I was messing around with Capybara (a Selenium client that controls a web page), and I had to debug what I was automating.
Turns out, you can automatically open Chrome dev tools by passing an option into the Selenium driver as seen here.
