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 :)