CS373 Fall 2020: Stephen Zheng

The following is for blog entry #11 for CS373.

What did you do this past week?

I finished phase 3 of the project with my group. For me, I was mostly populating a portion of the backend database and making sure there were at least 5 searchable, sortable, and filterable attributes. I also submitted a new user story and responded to the previous one. Additionally, I worked on the filling out a portion of the report. Outside the project, I attended lectures like usual and took the daily quizzes.

What’s in your way?

Nothing for now, but I intend to start on phase 4 of the project early this time.

What will you do next week?

Nothing planned for now, but I intend to start working on phase 4 of the project.

If you read it, what did you think of The Dependency Inversion Principle?

I thought that this principle was a lot more work to implement in practice than the previous ones. However, it did appear to have very obvious benefits, especially for larger projects. I still don’t know where I would apply this in our regular school projects though, because it seems like it would just make it unnecessarily complex for simple projects, since you essentially have to pull apart and abstract existing classes.

What was your experience of relational algebra in Python? (this question will vary, week to week)

I thought the relational algebra was pretty intuitive in Python. It is pretty easy to implement and doesn’t stray far from the rules in Python that we already know. However, the different types of joins are a bit confusing and I think I will definitely forget the differences between them in a few months time.

What made you happy this week?

I received a generous box of swag from Paycom for applying to them. This included a gaming keyboard, mouse, popcorn, a sugar cookie, and a crazy $75 prepaid Visa card.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Sometimes checking diffs in terminal can be really confusing for other class projects. I recommend using diffchecker and pasting two files that you want to compare for a better visual of the output differences.