CS373 Spring 2021: Ian Thorne (Week 11)

What did you do this past week?

Currently, “this past week” is technically the week before last, since I’m again writing this blog post a week late. I don’t have as good of an excuse this time, I just really wanted to take some time to relax, so here we are. The week I should’ve written this blog post was mostly occupied by working on the web project for this class and the Alpha build of my team’s game for the 3D game development capstone. We produced what I think is a pretty good deliverable, but it was definitely stressful to get there. We had four industry playtesters and they all had fairly good things to say, which felt pretty good.

What’s in your way?

At the time I should’ve written this, my desire to procrastinate and the sense that the semester is coming to a close were definitely in my way. Like everyone else, I imagine, I’m really ready for this semester to be over with — all things considered, it’s been a good one, but it sure has been a lot of work.

What will you do next week?

With “next week” in the rearview, I’ll just tell you what I did do that week. I spent a lot of time working on phase three of the web project. I felt like there wasn’t that much left to do, but like most assignments, I underestimated the amount of time it would take. Working on it on Friday, I sure was glad we got an extension from the original deadline of Tuesday. It took a few late nights, but we were able to finish the phase off to what I think is a pretty high degree of quality. Here’s hoping the TAs agree. On top of that, the late nights let us turn the project in much earlier than we did the last one (though, with only thirty seconds to spare on phase two, the bar was pretty low), which let me take some time Friday night to spend with my parents.

If you read it, what did you think of “Why getter and setter methods are evil”?

I did read it! Though I also did that late… Regardless, I thought the article was really interesting. I remember reading it in Object-Oriented Programming and being so confused, since I was so used to getters and setters — even other CS classes at UT use them, so it took a while to wrap my head around. Reading it again about a year later, it definitely makes a lot more sense and it’s kind of something I’ve taken to heart since then, when working on games. The thing that stuck out this time was when the author mentioned not building in “needless flexibility” and wasting time. Having spent a lot of time adding a lot of flexibility to a lot of game scripts that never ended up being used in more than one context, I can definitely relate to that feeling of wasting time on “needless flexibility.” It seems like spending time really designing and planning out how things will be used helps to avoid that issue.

What was your experience of select, project, cross join, and theta join?

I thought they all made a fair amount of sense. To be honest, the name “relational algebra” sounded sort of intimidating, so it’s been pretty nice to see that it’s really not that complicated. The operations we’ve learned about have been fairly simple and our Python implementation of them has made a lot of sense. That said, I’m curious how these things are actually implemented, since the implementation we’ve seen in class is probably what I’ll think of when I think of databases for a while.

What made you happy this week?

That week, I was very happy to get my first dose of a covid vaccine. I managed to not really experience any side-effects, which was nice, since it was a really busy week for me.

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

Since this blog post isn’t going to be graded, I’ll go ahead and give you a fun pick-of-the-week: Gordon Ramsay videos on YouTube. They played no small part in this blog post being written a week late and the platform has a seemingly endless amount of Gordon Ramsay content across all of his different TV shows. If you want some relaxed cooking content, he’s got that. If you want to see him yell at chefs he’d deem a “donut” or a “muppet,” he’s got that too. He really runs the whole gambit and I couldn’t recommend it enough. Fair warning, it can be pretty distracting.