CS 373 Spring 2021 Blog 11: Ian Trowbridge

What did you do this past week?

I finished the sitewide searching mechanic this week. With this part completed, I think that the majority of phase III is done now.

What’s in your way?

I am having a hard time motivating myself to work on the website project. I believe the website is mostly functional at this point, so all that remains is tests and styling. While I understand their importance, I have always found tests tedious to write. Furthermore, while rewarding, I have found styling to be a long and tiring process that requires knowledge of a variety of React packages.

What will you do next week?

I will try to get testing done and finish styling the site before the deadline. The technical report also needs to be updated to reflect the changes to the site and we need to ensure that this phase’s user stories are addressed. I have a report for my Concurrency class due Tuesday for a lab on 2 Phase Commit, so I will probably spend most of tomorrow working on that.

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

I thought that this week’s paper was enlightening. The author made a point that programmers who are used to procedural programming may be inclined to use getters and setters to avoid transitioning to the object-orientated style of programming. However, I was originally taught to program in Java, and I still feel that getters and setters were emphasized as the correct way to access and change data fields when designing objects. So it was interesting to read about how getters and setters can hurt encapsulation and cause a software engineering project to become difficult to maintain and update. I will try to avoid using these methods in the future whenever possible.

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

I thought that the explanation of these functions was straightforward. I would like it if we could go over the SQL commands that map to these joins, however.

What made you happy this week?

I finally got my first Pfizer vaccine shot Saturday. I am scheduled to receive my second shot by the end of the month.

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

Material UI is a great react framework for designing pleasant-looking user interfaces on the front-end.