CS373 Spring 2021 — Matthew Bianchi

Week 10

What did you do this past week?

This week, my group finished up our IDB part 2 assignment and submitted that. I felt that it went fairly well, and we got our website working and to a good point this week. I feel that our group is working well now that we’ve gotten into our stride, and am looking forward to how this semester ends.

What’s in your way?

This coming week, I still have several projects due, which will take up a lot of my time. I’m also signed up to take the Texas Government Test through UT this week, so I’m going to have to study a bit for that. However, I should still have plenty of time to work on this class and get our website ready for part 3.

What will you do next week?

This coming week, I plan to meet with my group members early on to figure out what tasks we need to get done, and then go from there. We took a bit of a break this week after our submission, but I am ready to get back to work on our project.

If you read it, what did you think of the Dependency Inversion Principle?

I feel like this is something that is very hard to teach in classes, but is overall very important to writing good code. By preventing independent code pieces from depending on each other and instead depending on an abstraction, it removes a lot of rigidity from the whole code base. However, in classes in school, code is often oversimplified compared to commercial code bases, so it is a lot harder to see the benefits of a system like this when working in something that has very few actual dependencies (often it feels more like an unnecessary novelty in such situations).

What was your experience of +, *, ** and decorators?

I felt that *args and **kwargs were very useful and easy to pick up overall, but the amount of specific rules about them make them a bit confusing in some different scenarios. Decorators took me a little bit of time to understand, but they seem like very powerful ways to modify Python functions that allow for much more readable and useful code. They also help make the code more modular by abstracting out separate parts of functions and making them more readable.

What made you happy this week?

This week I got my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine! I am on my way to immunity, which is exciting. I also got to spend time with my brother over the Easter break, which was nice since we don’t get to see each other that often.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My tip this week is to get out of the house. This is something Prof. Downing says every class, and it is so very important to get out and get some fresh air. With my workload, often I don’t get time to go outside, but whenever I do it gives me an opportunity to relax and take my mind off of my work. It is very useful to get time away from classes, especially this year, and that is a safe and great way to do so.