CS373 Spring 2021: Ian Thorne (Week 10)
What did you do this past week?
This past week, I scrambled to finish my frontend work on my team’s web project as well as an essay I needed to submit for my certificate program. Last Sunday and Monday were a whirlwind of both, unfortunately, with little sleep in between. That said, I think our website looks pretty good and I’m confident that I turned in a great essay for my certificate program. If you’re a UT student and you’re curious about it, it’s called the Bridging Disciplines Program and it lets you take classes from across majors within a variety of interdisciplinary themes. I’m in the program for Digital Arts and Media, since I want to go into game development, but there are programs for Museum Studies, Environment and Sustainability, and many more. If you want to check it out, I’ll leave the link here: https://ugs.utexas.edu/bdp. With that plug over, I mostly just relaxed from a very busy two weeks and tried to get an early start on the third phase of the web project.
What’s in your way?
This week, all of the projects from my classes are in my way. I’m not sure how all of my classes conspire to have big projects due at the same time, but they sure do a good job at it, so I’ve got a lot to work on this week. My game development capstone team has alpha play-testing coming up and we’ve got a lot of work to do to get our game to that state. Though, as long as I can stay focused (and get enough sleep) I’m confident I’ll be able to manage.
What will you do next week?
This next week, I’ll be working on the third phase of the web project, setting up the filtering interface for each of our models. I’ve learned a lot about JavaScript and React (and HTML and CSS and AWS and APIs and — you get the picture) so I’m feeling confident that I’ll be able to get my work done on this phase with less stress than phase two. At least I hope so. Aside from that, I’ll be working on my capstone team’s game to help us prepare for the alpha milestone, like I mentioned above, but I’ll also be working on a project for the research class I’m in this semester. I suspect this will be a busy week…
If you read it, what did you think of the Dependency Inversion Principle?
I thought the principle made a lot of sense, but it took me a while to read the article and come to (what I think is) a full understanding. Separating our mental models of which behaviors are dependent on which from the actual architecture we use to implement systems seems like an important part of following the principle. Since doing so is so difficult, though, I’m hoping that it’s just something that comes with practice.
What was your experience of +, *, **, and decorators?
I thought that the argument features that Python provides with * and ** seemed very useful. I’d seen *args and **kwargs in Python code in the past, but never fully understood how they worked, so seeing some sample use cases really helped. I thought the symmetry between the symbols when used with parameters in method declarations and with arguments in method calls was cool as well. Decorators also made a fair amount of sense. After having worked with JavaScript (and it’s many quirks…) in phase two of the web project, the idea of treating functions like any other object is starting to make more sense to me. Function that return new version of functions passed to them seem like they can be could be very useful in real-world applications. The idea of a decorator returning a class was a little more foreign to me, but after thinking about it, it made sense, too. To be super honest, I’m not sure what the + in this question is referring to, but if it’s referring to the difference between + and += for mutables and immutables, I was pretty comfortable with that, too.
What made you happy this week?
I’m not sure if this counts as bragging — weird times we’re living in — but I was able to schedule my first shot of the vaccine for this upcoming week! Like everyone else, I’m really looking forward to starting to put the last year or so behind us.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
This week, I’m going to reuse my pick-of-the-week from last week, because I wrote last week’s post today as well, on account of being so busy last Sunday. Because of that, I’m sure no one’s seen this pick, so I’d like to share it again in hopes that someone can get some use out of it. It’s a tutorial about React that you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke90Tje7VS0&t=5236s. Admittedly, this may be too late to help most people, since we already needed to figure it out for phase two, but if you’re shifting over to frontend for phase three of the web project, I’d definitely check it out!
