CS373 Spring 2021: Ian Thorne (Week 12)
What did you do this past week?
To be super honest, I just wrote last week’s blog post, so I’m going to lift my answer from that post: “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, thirty seconds is a pretty low bar to beat), which let me take some time Friday night to spend with my parents.”
What’s in your way?
Currently the seemingly endless piling up of projects from all of my classes is in my way. As it’s my last semester at UT, I decided to take it easy and only take fifteen hours with four project-based classes. Incredible, I know. It’ll all turn out just fine, but I have a lot of work to do in the next three or so weeks. It’s kind of weird, though, because just as much as I’m looking forward to the end of the semester, I know I’ll miss it when it’s over.
What will you do this week?
This week, my game development capstone team has our beta milestone milestone coming up, which means crunch time (just like the real industry, yay). I think we’ve left ourselves less work to do than we have on previous big milestone weeks, but regardless there’s still a lot to do and we haven’t been very productive this weekend. We always make it out okay and I think our game is pretty good, so I’m not that stressed about it, but I know it’s going to be a busy week. That said, I also have four other classes to worry about, so hopefully I’ll get to worry about those too…
If you read it, what did you think of “More getters and setters”?
I thought it was super useful. I like UI development, but when working on games and other applications I always struggle to fully separate the UI from the actual “business logic,” as the author called it. The article laid out a pretty good technique for doing so and it’s one that I’m hoping I’ll be able to apply in some way to another game I’m working on this semester. As a matter of fact that might be what I work on when I finish writing this blog post.
What was your experience of SQL?
I thought it made a lot of sense. I was curious what Dr. Downing meant when he said “declarative programming language,” and a cursory Google search would imply that it’s a language that doesn’t really allow programmers to sequence their operations. That said, I’d like to see a few more examples so the concept can really stick. Otherwise, I thought it was kind of strange that we got to SQL at this point in the semester. I know our Python implementation of relational algebra sort of relied on all of the other things we’d discussed up to that point, so we could only get to SQL now, but it feels kind of strange considering it might’ve helped earlier on with phase two of the web project.
What made you happy this week?
This week — today, in fact — I got to go to campus and take some senior photos, which was really cool, since it was something I sort of assumed the pandemic would put a damper on. We got to campus at 7:30 and it was pretty much a ghost town, so we didn’t have to worry about getting in anyone’s way or any other issues that might come with a packed campus. I’ve only been on campus a few times this school year, so it was a lot of fun just to be back and go to my favorite spots.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
It’s not really software related, since I didn’t discover any new tools this week, but my pick-of-the-week would be getting up early. I’m really not one to talk about getting up early, since I’m an absolute mess at getting up on time, but having gotten up early to take pictures today, I feel like I’ve gotten a ton of stuff done today and it’s only like 4:30. I’m hoping I can keep this getting-up-at-a-reasonable-time thing going, but we’ll just have to see. More on that next week, I guess.
