Blog 12: IDB3 Complete
1. What did you do this past week?
This past week, my group and I worked hard to finish up Phase 3 of the IDB project. We purposely started earlier for this phase — trying to work at least a little bit everyday — and the effort really showed when it came close to submission time. We were not in a mad rush to finish things as we had been with previous phases.
2. What’s in your way?
My group now will begin Phase 4 with an early start to balance the workload. I do have other projects and an essay to complete in the upcoming week, so it will be important to balance time between everything going on.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week, my group and I will get a head start on Phase 4 of the the project and likely take a similar approach so that we can avoid last minute chaos before submission. This does mean we will have to work every day, but after seeing how frequent work activity benefitted our performance on Phase 3, I think the new approach is well worth the effort.
4. What did you think of Paper 12. Why extends is evil?
I thought Paper 12 was a nice reiteration of the previous couple of papers that center around keeping object functions within the objects being affected. This sort of implementation minimizes coupling and dependencies that can break a program if an object were to change.
5. What was your experience of natural join and SQL?
I found natural join to be fairly easy to comprehend due to its similarity to theta join. With regard to SQL, I have had basic experience using it in the past, so after a brief refresher, I felt very confident using it in the exercise.
6. What made you happy this week?
This week, I was able to spend time with friends and family over the weekend as I went home to visit for Easter. It was a nice break away from campus especially as the last couple of weeks have been very busy. Since classes are close to wrapping up, I do not anticipate the workload to be getting any lighter either.
7. What’s your pick-of-the-week?
This article by Ben Linders talks about what role software plays in the fight against climate change and briefly discusses how software can be optimized to reduce energy consumption. While many cloud and data centers are moving toward the use of renewable energy, most centers still use energy from power grids which still primarily use fossil fuels. The only real approach software engineers can take to reduce the energy consumption of their programs is to implement features that only activate the related software when it is needed rather than keeping a program constantly running. I was thinking that this article would hold a more insightful realization, but this answer seems to be pretty intuitive.
