CS373 Spring 2021: Ian Thorne (Week 7)
What did you do this past week?
This past week, I again spent a lot of time working on my game development capstone. We had our first playable due this week and industry professionals play-tested our game, so there was a lot of pressure to have something good to present. Outside of that, I spent a fair amount of time figuring out how to get my group’s website’s CloudFront website connected to the address we got from Namecheap, but eventually I got it figured out. I also spent a fair amount of time setting up one of the model pages and some of the instance pages for our website. Check it out at dolladollabills.me!
What’s in your way?
This week, it seems like all of my classes are really piling on projects, so the main thing in my way is just the amount of work I’ve got to do. On top of that, I’ve got some stuff I really need to grade for the class I’m proctoring — since I’m sure those students would like their grades back… Aside from that stuff, there shouldn’t really be anything in my way, so as long as I can hunker down and get the work done, it should be pretty smooth!
What will you do next week?
This week, I really want to get started on the next phase of the web project. I was feeling pretty stressed out about how we’d go about scraping all the information we’ll need for the site, when I was working on the pages I was responsible for. With that in mind, I really want to spend some time with my group figuring out those details. I was also fairly confused by JavaScript as a programming language, since it’s so different from the languages I’m familiar with. It feels like there’s a lot of implied knowledge that the language assumes on the part of the programmer, so I want to spend some time really familiarizing myself with it.
If you read it, what did you think of the Open-Closed Principle?
I thought the Open-Closed Principle made a lot of sense. Again, I think I read it when I took Object-Oriented Programming with Dr. Downing, but it’s definitely good to read again after a year. In the last year I’ve worked on a lot of game development projects and I have a much greater respect for what the principle implies about the nature of software engineering and the architecture of solutions. Recently, I’ve even found myself considering how I might be able to limit the amount of changes I’d need to make to my code if I wanted to add a new feature and how I can keep that number down, so it’s cool to see that I’m on the right track when I’m making those considerations.
What was your experience of iterators and reduce2?
I thought the information about iterators made a lot of sense. The realization that iterators themselves were iterable was really interesting and is a really clever design on Python’s part. Learning how the reduce method is actually implemented was also cool, because I wasn’t sure how to go about doing it when Dr. Downing was explaining it’s proper behavior, but when it clicked that we had to make use of the iterability of iterators the solution became fairly clear.
What made you happy this week?
This week, I didn’t do anything too far out of the ordinary, but I was happy to take some time at the end of it to spend some time with my family just watching TV. It was a fairly stressful week, so just relaxing like that was nice — tangentially related, if you have Disney+ and you’re into Marvel, I’d definitely recommend WandaVision.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Again, I don’t have very much that’s tangible to recommend this week, but I will plug one of the APIs that my group will likely be making use of for the web project. Since one of our models is political districts, we wanted to use maps as a type of media for them, but we weren’t sure how we could programmatically get maps of each political district in the US. After some digging, I found mapbox, an API that can take in latitude and longitude information (and many other types of information) and return static images of maps and dynamic, interactive maps that can be embedded in web-pages!
