CS373: Week 9
What did you do this past week?
This week was much more relaxed since I don’t have any urgent projects due next week. I attended all the lectures and started working on the next phase of the software engineering project, mainly playing around with different UI styles and trying to figure out a specific style for our entire site.
What’s in your way?
There isn’t anything in the way at the moment. I was able to catch up on all my other classes that I was behind in (due to last week’s projects), so I’m happy with my current status on my work right now.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will continue to work through the project with my group. My goal is to finish updating the backend, and to implement filtering on my assigned page (which is on space-related news stories).
If you read it, what did you think of the Dependency Inversion Principle?
I thought that the paper was pretty clear with explaining the problem and possible solutions to it. I can definitely see many issues with classes that depend on a specific lower level class, like in the button example which must change for each addition of an output class. It will have to recompile for each addition of an output class, and making a new one means you’ll have to modify who-knows-how-many files to provide the proper support for the new class.
What was your experience of +, *, ** and decorators?
I have had experience passing lists as arguments with *, but ** is a new concept to me. It can be a little tricky to figure out where each variable parsed from a dictionary will be placed, since some of them may be actual arguments in the function parameters, but the examples in class were very helpful. I thought that implementing decorators was a little confusing at first, especially with where exactly each parameter is mapped to, but the exercise cleared everything up.
What made you happy this week?
Since I was able to catch up on all my work, I had some spare time to play piano. I really enjoy learning new songs and spending some time to relax was much needed after the last few stressful weeks.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week is to use Material-UI for styling in web-development. It is a great alternative to Bootstrap if you want to give your site a different look, and is extremely easy to learn and setup. It also includes an icon set (which Bootstrap does not support), which I find extremely helpful for designing pretty interfaces and buttons. It’s actually the UI library used by Google!
