CS 373 Fall 2020: Samantha Tuapen

Hello everyone! This is my eleventh blog post for CS373: Software Engineering

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I finally regained access to this Medium account! I wasn’t able to post my blog post last week because my account was under investigation :0 I posted on Wordpress instead which was so unfamiliar to me. But I am back and happy to be here!

In terms of the IDB project, I met with my group and we hashed out a plan for the visualizations we want to have on our site and got right to work on that. So far, everything is going well so I’m excited to finish this phase off on a blissful note.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is in my way at the moment :)

What will you do next week?

I will continue to work on the visualizations for our site this upcoming week. I’ve been working with the backend in the past two phases of this project, so I’m excited to cross over and work in the frontend territory for this phase.

What did you think of The New Methodology?

I found the paper to be a good reminder of why agile development has proven to be so successful and widely used. Market demands, technological advances, and software demands are so dynamic that us developers should respond to these changes quickly and efficiently. Though I believe it’s important to have a plan or design before jumping straight into the code, I also know it’s important to be flexible and adapt to the various challenges and demands that arise.

What was your experience with SQL?

I’ve worked with SQL very minimally while working on a side project where I used SQLite as my database (and by minimal, I only knew SELECT, DELETE, INSERT, and CREATE). It’s cool to learn how other useful commands work such as the inner join and theta join as well as sub queries. These operators can really expand one’s ability to manipulate data from relational tables.

What made you happy this week?

I recently made some language exchange friends on a language learning app, so I’ve been talking to them every day in French!

Je pense que le français est une belle langue et j'aime le parler, mais ma prononciation est merde.

I’ve also been finishing all my work for the day before 8pm somehow, so I’ve had more time to relax and catch up with friends over the phone! Maybe I can even get back in the swing of exercising regularly…

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

A very popular tool that has become increasingly useful during this time of social distancing is Visual Studio Code Live Share. It’s great for pair programming in this virtual environment, though it’s just not the same as passing around the GDC lab machine keyboard.

Thanks for reading my blog post this week! I’m so happy to finally have my account back :D