Blog 5

What did you do this past week?

This past week has been pretty light in terms of workload. In one of my other CS classes, my group had to turn in a design document for our semester project. Fortunately, we were all able to get behind a single idea, and it looks like it will be a very exciting project to work on. In SWE, my group and I met up to work on the parts of the project due for Phase 1. Since most of us were unfamiliar with the world of web development, a large portion of that time was spent researching, learning, and asking each other questions. I was able to make progress on the About page for our website, specifically in retrieving user stats using the Gitlab API.

What’s in your way?

The deadline for Phase 1 of the project is on Thursday, and we still have a number of issues that we need to close. Fortunately, I think most of the hard stuff has now been completed, so hopefully the rest of the work for Phase 1 will not be too difficult. By far, the main hurdle with this project is in the steep learning curve of web development, especially since the programming paradigm is so different from the stuff that we’ve learned in our other classes.

What will you do next week?

Our group needs to close out the rest of the issues for Phase 1. I also have a paper to write for my non-CS class that is due this week, but I should be able to devote most of my time to working on the SWE project.

What was your experience of iteration, AWS, and Chef Secure?

Professor Downing always finds an interesting way to communicate the eccentricities of Python, and his lecture on iteration was no exception. I was particularly surprised that calling iter() on an iterator always returns itself.
I’m glad we were able to get a lecture on AWS. Most of this class has focused on topics unrelated to the projects. While the lectures have proven to be pretty interesting, it still is frustrating to have to learn so much outside of the classroom. I had no prior experience with AWS, so getting the tutorial from Hannah was useful. I also found the lecture from Chef Secure to be quite interesting, especially when he showed us the the security risk when saving passwords in the browser.

What made you happy this week?

I discovered a board game bar in Austin that allows you to order food and play from a wide selection of games hosted at the restaurant. One of the games we played was called Captain Sonar. The rules proved to be a little confusing, so it took us a while to get the hang of the game. However, the game itself is very exciting, so we were all quite worked up by the end of it. Playing board games is always one of my favorite activities, so I’m glad that restaurants like this even exist.

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

When I went to vote last week, I noticed that we had to submit a printed paper ballot this time. I didn’t have to do this when I voted in previous years, so I suspect this is out of fear of ballot-tampering. The distrust of electronic voter machines is a sign that technology still has a long way to go if people are to entrust it to something as important as a governmental election.