CS373 Spring 2021: Matthew Bianchi
Week 6
What did you do this past week?
This past week has been a lot of recovery. Because of the winter storm, I had to focus more on surviving that, which made me have to catch up on a lot of my classes. For this class, I met with my group and we formed an idea, and we are planning to get some significant work done early this coming week.
What’s in your way?
The main thing in my way right now is other classes. I have 3 projects due this week and a test this coming Friday. Some of these were pushed back or shortened due to the storm, so I have spent some time catching up on those other projects. After this week, I hopefully will have a little bit of calm with only one week left until Spring Break.
What will you do next week?
This week, I will be meeting up with my group members to continue working on our project. We have a good idea, and we are beginning to put together all of our resources for the project. I am optimistic about how this semester will go, but I do think it will be a lot of work.
If you read it, what did you think of the Single Responsibility Principle?
I feel like the Single Responsibility Principle is a very good thing to attempt to implement in your code, but I feel like it is very difficult to actually do correctly. It is very easy to either combine two different responsibilities and create rigidity, but you also have to balance out the need for simplicity and avoid unnecessary complexity in your code. One thing that I think is important is to recognize your axes of change, and only separate code if there are two of those axes. This is a lot harder in practice than it seems, but it is a good goal to work towards with programming.
What was your experience of IDB1 and reduce?
For IDB1, we have made some progress. We have created a sample API and are planning to continue more work on the rest of the project this week. I have been extremely busy with other projects, so I haven’t been able to do as much work on the project as I would have liked, but I feel like I will be able to be more productive moving forward.
How did you fare in the storm?
The storm for me was quite a difficult ordeal. I am staying with my parents in North Austin this semester, and we lost power for almost 60 hours straight, from Sunday night until Wednesday around noon. Temperatures in our house fortunately did not get below 50 degrees, but it was still quite cold. I had to visit a friend with power in order to charge up my phone and some battery packs on Tuesday. After we got power back on Wednesday, we were back to “normal” for a couple hours before our water stopped. Our whole neighborhood had no running water until Sunday, so we had to rely on bottled water to make it through the week. Overall, quite an eventful week, and although we had it bad, we are fortunate to have made it through. Hopefully, moving forward we won’t ever have to deal with something like this again.
What made you happy this week?
This week, I was able to celebrate my one year anniversary with my girlfriend! Our anniversary was the week before this but due to the storm we were unable to celebrate it. Now that the snow has gone, we finally were able to get to see each other and celebrate.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is to make sure to get to know your group members. I am in several group projects this semester, and the most enjoyable ones are the ones where the group members get to know each other on more than just an academic level. By actually getting to know each other and enjoy each other’s company, it makes the projects that much better and that much more enjoyable for your team.
