Week 7

Class:
Onto a new week. This week marked an important shift in the course. The focus of the course has now shifted towards databases. More specifically SQL and XML/JSON representations of the data stored in these SQL databases. This doesn't exactly mean that we are not going to be looking at python anymore though. In fact earlier this week we worked on converting a select and project statement into python code. I guess this is the professors way of making us understand exactly what the SQL statements are doing. On a harsher note I received my Test 1 grade and it was much worse than I expected. I was expecting a high B especially since I had studied much harder for this exam over the other one (Generic programming). It has however been such a tiring and event packed week that I have not had any time to go talk to the grader and see what mistakes I (or hopefully he) has made. This will likely happen tomorrow during his office hours.

Project:
Phase two of the project was completed in one week this time since everyone was focusing on the exam for the first week. This phase of the project was really tough as I seemed to be a little lost. It seemed like everyone had gotten a hold of one or two particular aspects of the project that they had locked down and owned as their responsibility. I on the other hand (given a limited time schedule due to the Deque Project) kept bouncing from one team mate to the other trying to make myself as useful as possible. I kept asking "what do you need me to do?" and then did my best to own up to the task assigned. With all that said, Im hoping on this next and final phase I will have more opportunities to contribute since I was able to get pretty familiar with unit testing the Apiary API. It should also help that the professor has given us adequate time (two weeks) to get the final phase complete and the final exam won't be until the week after.

Week 6

Class:
So now we are on the other side of the exam and boy what an exam that was. There was nothing out of the ordinary. I didn't see anything that wasn't expected. In fact I was somewhat surprised at the difficulty (which wasn't so bad) but I would like to attribute that to myself being adequately prepared. I really liked the new exam format the professor set up. The entire exam was like a giant test suite in which we would have to write the functions along with test cases for our solution. I really liked this set up for several reasons. First of all it didn't require us to know the painfully small details that the previous exam format demanded of us. No more multiple choice requiring us to know what the output would be with the annoying answer choice "does not compile" to make us second guess. The next reason I liked this test was because even if you were dead lost on how to code the solution, you still had the opportunity to write test cases for it and gain some easy points. Finally, this exam was better because it, like other aspects of the class, prepared you for the real world. If you walked out of this exam earning the majority of the points simply from writing test cases, then there is a good indication that you should pursue a Software Development Engineer in Test position (SDET) position rather than just a software development engineer position.

Project:
We were contacted earlier in the week by the grader for IDB1 (Tyler) who informed us that we lost 10 points because our site was down. This was hard to believe because none of us had touched any of the code since the Thursday night turnin and because it was all working fine up until Monday of this past week. The error seems to have been generated from within pythonanywhere as we had seen the site be fairly buggy from the start. We pulled our code using the same SHA that we had used to submit and replicated the site at a new address (also on pythonanywhere) and it miraculously worked... with no changes whatsoever... We explained ourselves to the TA and luckily got back all our lost points. Lets just hope whatever this bug was doesn't show itself again.

Week 5

Class:
Once again we were faced with a short week as there was no class this past Friday due to final exams for first session classes. I am really thrilled to see that the material is finally shifting towards making classes. Im not sure how much the professor is going to stress object oriented programming principles and paradigms but seeing classes show up in the example slides is definitely refreshing. I feel like this will be very useful for our projects. Again the material is becoming trickier to remember as Python blurs the lines between where a function begins and where it ends... From what I understand functions are declared in the heap so that they retain some form of life even when the execution path leaves the function and similarly some functions can access data from the calling function which is odd behavior but definitely useful. Its finally test week so the professor has uploaded some useful information on how to prepare for the test which is a huge relief. We have also been told that the exam will involve strictly writing code. Good luck to everyone and see you on the other end!

Project:
Phase one of the project was fun. I'm super lucky to have found a very talented group of individuals. Since the idea that was chosen was my own, I was very pleased to see the result of the end of phase one. While the future of this project will definitely be beyond the scope of this class, I hope the rest of this project helps us create the solid ground work that will allow us to make this project generate some real cash and actually be a useful site for Austinites looking for a bite to eat. I went out this past weekend and secured a domain name for the future completed site to be housed at and Im going to suggest to my group this week that we officially go forth with the name kravester for our project. I believe the hardest part of this past week was juggling the project for this class with the Big Integer project for the STL class but more about that on the other blog...

Week 4

Class:
We are now a good ways into the course and spent this past week working on function defaults. More specifically we learned how functions determine the values of their variables and the several ways in which we can specify those variables from the function call. This week was a little bit easier to follow in my opinion and I didn't have too hard of a time keeping up. I must say that it definitely helps to try and answer other peoples posts on piazza. This week a student posted a question and although I thought I knew the answer at first, I spent some time playing with python and trying different inputs to solidify my understanding of the material we learned this week while writing my response. Check out post 171 on piazza for a quick summary of some of the things we learned this week about unpacking and specifying function calls.

Project:
This project is extremely intimidating. I spent some time last year working on a dynamic website by following tutorials from www.lynda.com. It was a really cool experience but it was EXTREMELY time consuming. The main reason for that is a) I had no prior experience with any aspect of web development. b) I didn't know frameworks like django and bootstrap can make my life easier. But as a fortunate consequence, I learned how to read HTML, JavaScript, and some CSS (which I loathe). I also learned about MySQL and PHP. Most importantly I had learned how all of the above comes together to create a dynamic website. The challenging part about this project is that if you don't know much about any of the above, it can all really go over your head. I am really glad that the professor has grouped us together in hopes that we all learn something from each other but if you end up in a group that isn't very diverse in terms of skill sets, be prepared because there is likely a HUGE learning curve ahead. Our first week was off to a great start as we have a pretty solid, diverse, and experienced team. I can't wait to see all of the teams' end results.

Good Luck to all the teams :)