CS373 Spring 2021: Ian Thorne (Week 13)

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I spent a majority of my time working on my team’s game for the 3D game development capstone and a game I’m working on as a research project. For whatever reason, my capstone group elected to wait to write all of our game’s dialogue until the week of our beta milestone. I’m not sure why we did that, but we ended up getting it all done — and it’s pretty good if I do say so myself. Considering it was the week of our beta milestone, it was definitely crunch time, so Wednesday and Thursday were really stressful, but we made it through alright and playtesters seemed to really enjoy our game.

What’s in your way?

Currently, the immense amount of work from all of my classes, combined with being very ready for the semester to be over is what’s in my way. I’ve basically got big projects to work on for all five of my classes, so starting this week, I’ll really need to get to work to get everything done. That said, I’m still pretty confident that this semester is easier than last semester was, so I think I’ll make it out alright — but I’ll keep you posted on that one.

What will you do next week?

This next week, I need to do a lot of work on the game I’m working on as part of a research project. I’m confident that we’ll be able to get everything done that we need to, but today and tomorrow are going to be pretty busy for us to meet our Tuesday deadline for this week’s deliverable. In terms of this class, I’m also going to really get started on phase four of the web project. I probably should’ve gotten some more done last week, but I’ll definitely make sure to prioritize it this week. After the last two phases, there are definitely a handful of things about our frontend codebase that I want to change, and I’m glad that we’re getting a phase of the project where we can kind of focus on those types of optimizations and improvements.

If you read it, what did you think of What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You?

I did read it, and I was shocked at the of the authors’ accounts of discrimination and harassment that they’ve experienced in academia and the industry. It boggles my mind that there are people out there that have those sorts of prejudices and behave in a way that makes so many people feel uncomfortable and alienated in the field they chose to go into. With more and more attention being drawn to it, I’m sincerely hoping that this is an issue that we’ll be able to resolve in the near future.

What was your experience of joins and refactoring?

In terms of the various types of SQL joins we talked about this week, I thought they made sense, but I definitely need to go back and re-watch some of the lectures, since I struggled to remember how some of them worked when working on the in-class exercise on Wednesday. I think it’s really cool that we’re talking about refactoring, though. I wish more classes would spend more time on how to design good solutions to problems and improve poor designs, like this class has. I find that most projects are a lot easier when I have a clear picture in mind of how the different parts of the system will interact, and I think that learning about refactoring will give me some good best-practices moving forward.

What made you happy this week?

This week, the finale of The Falcon and The Winter Soldier came out on Disney+. I’m not going to give anything away, but as a huge Marvel fan, I can say that it was awesome. I’d been really enjoying watching the series with my family and I was happy to see the finale. (Only a couple more months until Loki comes out!)

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

Again, I don’t really have any explicitly programming related picks or tips, so I’ll just say that sleep is important. Go figure. If you’re working on something and not really feeling like you’re getting anywhere and you’re feeling pretty tired, just get some sleep. Odds are whatever bug you were tracking down or feature you were working on will seem much more obvious when you’re well-rested. This may be a bit of a cop out on a tip-of-the-week, but I find that it can be helpful to hear it from others.