CS 373 Fall 2020: Samantha Tuapen
Hi everyone! This is my seventh blog post for CS373: Software Engineering
What did you do this past week?
These past two weeks have been jam-packed with projects, midterms, and interviews, hence why I didn’t upload a blog post last weekend :( However, I did get plenty done in terms of developing the backend for our project and studying for our first exam in this course.
What’s in your way?
Hosting our site with our custom docker build image using AWS Amplify is in my way!! I’m sure everyone else in my group feels the same way. We’ve spent countless hours with the TAs and we make progress every time, yet we still haven’t successfully been able to deploy our site with our newly added backend.
What will you do next week?
Next week, my group will have our site hosted properly with our docker image whether its through AWS Amplify or some other infrastructure! And I will finish up the rest of phase II of our IDB project — specifically with the backend tasks — and ensure we have all the features listed in the rubric. Then, we’ll make a more organized and detailed plan as to how we’ll tackle the next phase.
What did you think of The Liskov Substitution Principle?
I’ve learned and employed OOD ever since I began coding so I was familiar with the concepts of inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction that were discussed in the paper. However, ‘The Liskov Substitution Principle’ brought up important design questions to consider when creating methods that manipulate the attributes of a base class that I either haven’t considered before or didn’t realize pertained to the design. Using preconditions and postconditions helps mitigate these issues, however the examples showed using assertions for these conditions which I’ve learned are not good for unit testing or user errors.
What was your experience of Test #1?
Test #1 was my first time taking one of Professor Downing’s exams and I was nervous to see how pressed for time I’d be in the first half of Wednesday’s exam. I felt well prepared in terms of understanding the content, thanks to a study plan I created for myself and reviewing and discussing concepts with my group members. I found the exam questions well written to test our understanding of iterables, generators, iterators, classes, and functions in Python. Also, being able to collaborate with my group after an individual attempt was a great way to learn from others and further solidfy our understanding of these important concepts.
What made you happy this week?
Season 4 of The Good Place was released on Netflix recently and I’ve been periodically watching it with my sister as a way to take breaks from my long hours of work and just to hang out with her. That show is written soooo well, those writers are geniuses.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
A term that I recently learned in my management course at UT and something I’ve been more aware of especially as I’m working through this project is ‘escalating commitment’. The Wikipedia definition of escalating commitment is:
‘a human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continues the behavior instead of altering course’
There have been many times where I came across obstacles in designing or implementing the backend that I spend long hours working at, without significant progress. There have been many learning curves for me in the project since I’m relatively new to web development, so it’s difficult for me to distinguish whether I should press on through a road block or when I should back up and try an alternative. Being able to admit that a decision is doing more harm than good and taking action to reevaluate the situation is an important skill to have to avoid falling into escalating commitment.
Glad to be back to writing again! Thanks for reading my blog post this week.
