CS373 Spring 2021: Ian Thorne (Week 14)
What did you do this past week?
This week, I worked on a whole lot of projects for my other classes. I spent pretty much all of Monday and Tuesday working on a game that four other computer science majors and I are working on as a research project. Past that, I had to spend a good amount of time on my 3D game development capstone project and started working on a project for the RTF class I’m in. The RTF project is pretty exciting since I’m creating a “playable” pause menu GUI modeled off of Persona 5’s pause menu, but in the style of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I’ve been learning a whole lot about working in Photoshop, which has been pretty cool.
What’s in your way?
Currently, one more week of classes and five more projects to turn in. I’ve got a lot of work to do in this last week and the sheer amount of it is really intimidating. I know I’ll be able to get everything done, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty stressed out about it. On top of that, I’m graduating this semester, so I’ve sort of got a senioritis-like feeling of not wanting to do anything, which has sort of been getting in the way for the last couple of weeks. I’d be pretty disappointed if I didn’t finish strong in my last week at UT though, so I’m confident it’ll work out.
What will you do next week?
This week, I’ll be working on the projects I mentioned earlier. I’ve got to finish that GUI project I described earlier by Tuesday along with phase four of the web project. We’ve also got a deliverable for our research project that’s due on Tuesday, so the first half of this week is definitely going to be more difficult than the second. That said, I’ll need to work on my game development capstone project and a project for my game history class in the second half of the week, as well as any other minor assignments I need to complete before classes end.
If you read it, what did you think of The Joel Test?
I thought it was a great article. Everything the author mentioned was super valuable advice and it all pretty much fell into two categories: 1) “my project groups do these things and they really are helpful” and 2) “man, I wish my project groups did that, that would be really helpful.” I especially liked that he called out the importance of documenting bugs and fixing them before writing new code, since those two are incredibly important to keeping a well-scoped and stable project. Outside of those things, the thing I appreciated most was the author’s funny take on the subject. I feel like a lot of articles and documentation explaining computer science topics are unnecessarily dry. Adding a little humor both makes it a more enjoyable read and it makes me more excited about writing my own documentation when I have to do so.
What was your experience of Replace Type Code with State/Strategy (227)?
I’m assuming this was the refactoring we discussed in class where we replaced a switch statement with a new class hierarchy with the abstract AbstractPrice class and its children for different types of movie prices. If that assumption is correct, I thought it made a lot of sense. I was really curious to see if and how we’d be able to fully remove all of the switch statements, and using Java’s reflection mechanism was definitely something I never would’ve thought of. Again, I think it’s awesome that this class spends time focusing on refactoring, since it’s a super under-appreciated skill in most college courses, since the time frames for projects typically just don’t allow for it.
What made you happy this week?
It’s nothing super extravagant, but my parents and I ordered a pretty good dinner last night and had a fun conversation while we were eating. Nothing super exciting happened this week, but it’s nice to stop and appreciate the small stuff like that. I know I’m definitely looking forward to being able to have a meal at a restaurant.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
This week, my tip-of-the-week is NOT TO PROCRASTINATE. Rich coming from me, I know (especially since I may have already used this tip), but it’s the last week of classes and it’s time to finish strong! If you’re stressing about the amount of work you have to do, putting that work off definitely will not help. You’ve got to pick one thing and knock it out and just keep doing that until everything you need to do is done.
