CS373 Spring 2021 — Matthew Bianchi

Week 11

What did you do this past week?

This past week, I continued working on the IDB project. Most of my focus was related to backend filtering for numeric values, essentially creating minimum and maximum values for parameters. I also had two tests this past week and a couple more projects I had to work on.

What’s in your way?

This coming week, I have another project in a separate class coming up, and honestly the stress of taking three project-based courses is starting to catch up to me. The good news is that the semester is only one more month, and then I will be able to get some much needed time off.

What will you do next week?

I hope to finish up my requirements for our group project early on in the week, and I plan to use the rest of the week to make sure that everything comes together for our project, modifying test cases to ensure that our code works properly.

If you read it, what did you think of “Why getter and setter methods are evil”?

I felt that the paper brought up a good point, but I did notice a couple inconsistencies in logic when it first proposed its idea, as brought up by some of my classmates. One of the biggest things was the idea that getter and setter methods are type dependent, and changing the type of the variable underneath caused a lot of code outside of the class to need to change, which makes sense. However, all other methods also have a type associated with its parameters and return value, so this doesn’t seem to different than rewriting a method like that to use different types. I do admit that abstracting the need for a getter and setter into the class containing the variable makes a lot of sense, though. I also think that getters and setters are taught to us as newer programmers to try and explain good habits of not using public variables, but the true reasoning for them has been watered down over time. I think as we become more advanced programmers, we should start to recognize the instances where we can and should avoid using getters and setters.

What was your experience of select, project, cross join and theta join?

Relational Algebra in general is a somewhat foreign concept to me, but I feel that it builds off of several concepts I have learned in other math classes, such as the closed versus open functions. I felt that these commands were fairly straightforward to learn about and made sense, and would be very useful in applications.

What made you happy this week?

This week, I was finally able to take some time for myself and get out of the house. I had been cooped up inside with a lot of projects this week, so finding any time where I could get out of the house was very refreshing. I play disc golf, and was able to get in a good round this weekend with one of my friends, something I had been struggling to find the time to do. Just being able to get out and talk to one of my friends again feels so refreshing, and has been something I have lacked throughout this semester.

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

My tip of the week this week is to see the finish line. With only a month of classes left to go, the semester is getting closer to the end. Especially because of how rough this year has been, keeping that goal in mind can help motivate you to get all of your work done so you can reach that final goal.