Blog 7

What did you do this past week?

This past week, my group and I began work on phase 2 of the project. It looks like phase 2 will require a lot more work to complete (especially compared to the other phases), but, if you include Spring Break, we also have more time to work on this one. So far for this project, I wrote and posted the user stories for our developer, and I scraped the API of one of our models and packaged it up into a JSON. I did a bit of data-cleaning with my Python script beforehand, and this was done to eliminate certain data points that we didn’t care about or combine attributes of different queries to augment our data points.

I also spent a lot of time last week working on assignments for my other classes, and I’ve had to grade exams for the class that I proctor for. It’s a very large CS class, so it’s taken me longer than expected to get through these exams. I now understand why my old teachers kept saying how much easier it was to grade correct answers than try to understand why a wrong answer was wrong.

What’s in your way?

Phase 2 presents a lot of new tools and frameworks that we need to familiarize ourselves with. My little exposure to databases has come from my work in industry, but there is still a lot more I need to learn to be able to meaningfully contribute to this project. That being said, these new tools look very promising, and I look forward to learning them.

What will you do next week?

I’m trying to avoid working on the SWE project during Spring Break. However, I have several exams, projects, and a paper all due this week, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to dedicate to the project. If that is the case, then I’ll definitely have to work on the project over break, since the deadline for phase 2 is the week after break.

I’m close to finishing my projects due this week, so the rest of my week will be spent studying for the exams and writing that paper.

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

Unpacking arguments in functions still feels like a very foreign idea to me. It’s nice that Python can even support such functionality, but it’ll definitely take me some time getting used to. I really like how decorators not only simplify code, but they also improve the code’s style and readability.

What made you happy this week?

I got to spend quality time with my friends grabbing food and playing board games.

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

An article by the New York Times recently came out detailing the software flaws of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. One of the issues involved setting the clock on the spacecraft incorrectly. The article states that the engineers had failed to catch the bug during testing because they had split the simulation into chunks instead of running it as a whole. This shows us that, while unit tests are important, integration tests are vital in confirming the integrity of a system.