CS373 Fall 2021 Blog 9: Mason Eastman
What did you do this past week?
This past week I went to lectures and worked a lot on Phase 2. Since I had such a busy week prior, I kind of had to push all of this work to this past week, but it’s gone well. I wrote a ton of unit tests, managed the AWS services, and continued to update some of the frontend in response to user-stories.
What’s in your way?
Our API is having this weird issue where it will randomly hang every now and then, with a page refresh seemingly solving the problem. What’s odd is that it was working fine as recently as yesterday, and we didn’t make any changes to our backend code that could’ve broken anything (still runs fine locally). It almost seems like the EC2 instances are crashing and returning error codes to EBS, but I don’t know AWS well enough to know if that’s the case. I hope the health improves soon though, or we can find a fix.
What will you do next week?
Next week I’ll wrap up Phase 2 with my team, and probably take a few days off before starting Phase 3. This Phase was a lot of work, but I’m proud of what we’ve done — it’s really neat! I have some other projects to work on in the meantime, so I’ll get to those before starting the next phase.
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #8: Interface Segregation Principle?
I thought it was another good addition in the SOLID papers we’ve been reading over the last few weeks. Likewise it’s full of good information and tactics for programmers to write better code, especially when it comes to coupled functionality and when to delegate functionality.
What was your experience of functions, closures, and decorators?
I’ve been exposed to closures in a previous CS class, but it was good to go over them again with new examples and perspective. Decorators are something I’d heard of, but never used until now. The concept is still a little confusing to me, but the many explanations and the in-class exercise helped me to make more sense out of it. Overall they seem like a powerful tool one can use.
What made you happy this week?
Earlier today I went with my girlfriend on a very fall themed date! It involved hay rides, pumpkins, and lots of pretty flowers. Was a fun way to take a break from all the work and screens.
What’s you pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
If you’re responsible for managing the AWS stuff for your group, always keep the console in an open tab, or easily accessible. I’m the AWS-keeper for my team, and we had an issue with our API that we weren’t sure about, but after I decided to check the Elastic Beanstalk console I saw the problem and have been trying to troubleshoot a fix. AWS is pretty complicated, especially with all the moving parts we have going on in this project, but it does a good job of letting you know when something is wrong (even if it doesn’t provide the most understandable error logs).
