CS373 Fall 2021 Blog 12: Mason Eastman
What did you do this week?
This week I attended lectures, did all of the quizzes and exercises, and worked more on Phase 3. I’m doing tests for the sorting, filtering, and searching, in addition to styling the site so it looks a bit better on all devices. I met with my teammates and TA to discuss our progress as well. My teammates and I have definitely found our groove, so this phase has gone really well.
What’s in your way?
I got sick toward the end of last week and remained so over the weekend (thankfully it’s not COVID, strep, or flu), so I lost some time to work while that was running its course. However I’ve felt a lot better as today has progressed so hopefully I wake up tomorrow refreshed and feeling good again.
What will you do next week?
Next week I’ll wrap up my work on Phase 3 and meet with my team one last time before we submit to make sure we’ve got everything we need. I’ve got a Game Programming Paradigms project due on Friday, so I’ll work on that the remainder of the week, as well as starting my final Information Retrieval project — 3 CS classes means I don’t really get to catch a break from working haha, but taking a few days off before also starting Phase 4 will help me balance everything out!
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #12: More Getters and Setters?
I thought it was another great read on the importance of knowing the risks of using Getters and Setters, and presenting some more alternatives to them; in particular, the Builder design (using Importer and Exporter classes in the context of building UI in the paper) was something I was unfamiliar with, but want to learn more about. It also stressed that if used in the wrong way, Getters and Setters essentially turn private variables into public ones, which comes with its own set of problems.
What was your experience of cross join, theta join, natural join, and SQL?
I didn’t have any experience of these joins coming into last week, but all the Python examples and exercises really helped me to get a good understanding of each, and situations they might be used in. Additionally, while I had some loose familiarity with SQL syntax/commands, it was good to formally go over them in a classroom setting and learn how they build on each other.
What made you happy this week?
When I was sick yesterday my roommate went to the store to get me some medicine, chicken-noodle soup, and hot chocolate, which was really sweet of him to do!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is CodeReport, (yet) another coding YouTube channel I found, this time while I was sick and surfing the web. He talks about some pretty cool stuff, most notably optimized solutions to different problems in different languages and comparing the strengths and weaknesses of each; and it’s where I was exposed to APL (literally named A Programming Language) for the first time, which is a wildly unique language compared to anything I’ve seen, and definitely worth looking at simply out of curiosity.
