CS 373 Fall 2020: Samantha Tuapen

Hi everyone! This is my ninth blog post for CS373: Software Engineering

What did you do this past week?

I worked on repopulating some tables in our database for our IDB project and refactoring some of our API endpoints. This phase is a lot more chill than last since we’re mostly just cleaning up and refining our code. I hope this gives us more time to focus on the non-coding aspects of our project, like the technical report.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is in my way in regards to the project, however I realize I need to spend a lot more time playing around with the concepts of unpacking and regular expressions because even though it all made sense during lecture, I found myself getting confused on some things when taking the quizzes.

What will you do next week?

I will finish up phase III of this IDB project and get started on planning for the next phase with my group! This is also a great time for me to get to work on some other projects I’ve recently been assigned in my other CS classes.

What did you think of The Interface Segregation Principle?

The ISP is an interesting design principle that seems very important when it comes to better code maintainability and scalability. This paper helped me realize that I used to write my classes and interfaces with many dependencies, so now I’ll utilize multiple inheritance to avoid creating “fat” interfaces and reducing unnecessary couplings.

What was your experience of instance methods, class methods, static methods, regular expressions, and relational algebra?

Instance methods and static methods in Python were easy to grasp since other languages I’m familiar with like Java classify methods like that as well. However, I am still slightly confused about the use for class methods since it seems like static methods have a similar functionality. I’ll have to look into that on my own time. As for regex, I learned about its theory and application in a different CS elective course, however it’s fun to actually work with it in code. And for relational algebra, I’ve been exposed to it through working on the database and backend for our IDB project, but I’m looking forward to learning about it formally.

What made you happy this week?

Soo many things: the weather, my new hair (I got highlights! I’ve never dyed my hair before and I’m glad it turned out well), the end of my internship hunt, binge-watching a show TWICE (I never re-watch things, so this is big for me), early voting with my mom, being able to unplug for the majority of Halloween to spend time with family, and trying a Tiffblitz for the first time!

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

In addition to using Notion to organize our tasks, my team uses Toggl Track to track the time we spend working on this project. It’s so easy to use, especially if you install the Chrome extension it’s just one click to start and stop! I might even try using it to time my work in other courses, just to get an idea of how much time I spend for each class.

Thanks for reading my post this week! I hope you’ve already voted or plan to vote November 3:)