Week 8

Class:
This was rather a short week. Class was cancelled as the professor had to take care of some official UT business on Friday. We also had a guest speaker on Wednesday. The guest speaker was from a local austin company that makes software for mobile devices for various clients. The topic of the lecture was about responding to change in the world of software development. Imagine that you have written thousands of lines of code that uses a specific underlying content service provided by a third party and then all of a sudden the company that provides that services goes out of business. As a result the service is no longer supported. Although other companies quickly move in to replace that service, your code is now broken. This catastrophe can be made much more manageable by using the SOLID principles discussed in class. Such was the case when Google decided to discontinue their RSS feed reader. Companies that had written code using the SOLID principles were able to quickly interchange small portions of code that connected their software to one of the many new services after choosing an alternate service provider and the rest of the pieces worked as they should with minimal to no changes at all. Other companies had to start from scratch.

Project:
The final phase of the project is a bit more involving. One of the biggest challenges is having to critique another groups website. The problem arrises when we have to critique something that is changing frequently and heavily. The group we were tasked with critiquing decided to modify their API drastically after we had already coded up many test cases for their API. Another problem we faced early on was that Django 1.6 doesn't allow us to change our model without forcing us to dump all of our data. I spent an entire day early on trying to upgrade our website to Django 1.7 to prevent this problem but pythonanywhere kept giving me lots of issues. After loosing a day we decided to stay on 1.6 and cut our losses.
Being ambitious, we are looking to launch our site publicly soon and seek to allow the general public to submit reviews. This means we have to really hustle and put together the entire underlying architecture that will be able to support multiple users logging into our site to leave comments, ratings, and reviews for dishes.