Week 9

Class:
Once again this was a rather short week. We had a guest speaker from Indeed.com on Wednesday. For those of you who don't know Indeed is a job listing aggregator and search site. Our speaker was a software engineer and had come in to talk in particular about various tools and processes used in development. Early into the presentation however the presentation seemed to turn more into a question answer session in which we asked the speaker various questions about developing the in the real world and he answered them to the best of his ability. Although the presentation was quite informative I strongly feel the speaker would have benefited by creating a powerpoint presentation ahead of time. This would have helped him organize his thoughts and stay on topic as there were several occasions where we digressed.

The week started off by going over some code written in java in which we abstracted a video rental store application that calculated the rental charges of a given video. Through each iteration of code we refactored and modified the general architecture of the code and explored the consequences of our decisions. This helped to show how a little bit of pre-thought can help make the code cleaner and run faster. We finished off the week by revisiting the final iteration of the video store and also covering some popular design pattens like factor method, singleton, etc... I do however feel that we should have had the guest speaker come in on a Friday as I feel a lot of people had a hard time remembering the examples from Monday.

Project:
The final phase of the project was not as difficult as I had expected. The only real major addition to our site was the search function. Our partner Kevin came up with a brilliant solution in which we used Beautiful Soup (html parser) as the text that we would search in order to determine our results. For a small dataset this is feasible but we feel in the future we will definitely have to revisit our search function. Given that our final exam is coming up we all elected to not push the bar and implement user logins. The end goal is to do better on our exams instead.