CS 373 Blog October 18–25
What did you do this past week?
I finished up the necessary components of the front end for phase 2. We got pagination working on the grid page, and hopefully we can get sorting on top of that system this next week. I also had two papers that I finished up and turned in for other classes, and got started studying for an algos test next week.
Thankfully most of my week was over on Thursday, and I have been enjoying a bit of a break these last few days. The only thing pertaining this class aside from attending the Friday morning lecture has been some light reading and watching a couple videos for phase 3.
What’s in your way?
It looks like I will continue my trend of busy weeks, as I have a lot of early November due dates to meet, and I have to figure out how to implement the new goals for phase 3 on the frontend.
What will you do next week?
I am going to work with the other frontend developer to fix up a few small bugs that we couldn’t squash before the phase 2 deadline, and then get going on the new challenges for phase 3. We need to make a new page to display the site-wide search results, presumably with some sort of pagination available, then actually implement the searching.
On a slightly different note, I’d love to beautify our instances, there is a lot of room for some javascript magic, adding in conditional colors and putting in commas on some large numbers we have.
What did you think of Ethical CS?
I think it is important to recognize how much a programmer can influence the world, especially as it becomes increasingly reliant on computers and technology. The ways to actually approach that goal are difficult though, as there are a lot of institutional practices that programmers need to be informed about and work to change. For example, to what extent can you be an ethical programmer if you are working for a company that systematically evades ethical and moral issues, or isn’t an ethical member of the communities it influences?
What was your experience of functions, lambdas, and decorators?
Learning about them in-depth was interesting in Python, mainly because of how flexible they are in almost all respects. The extent of * and ** magic that a function can accept is almost ridiculous. I can definitely value that level of flexibility in a language, but hope that I never have to debug something that looks like the quiz questions on Friday. The possible inputs on functions written that way quickly become almost incomprehensible.
Lambdas are eternally useful for defining quick functions inline, and definitely are a nice space saver. It is cool to learn how they work with references, allowing you to modify the underling objects as desired before executing the lamba.
Decorators are definitely a powerful concept when working in an OOP framework. I love that you can bolt on functionality as needed, without messing up the original functions that are taken as inputs for the decorator. While it is nice to have, the syntactic sugar on the decorators is definitely a bit strange to me, since an “@” looks out of place in code.
What made you happy this week?
Definitely the weather these last few days. On Friday I actually got to wear pants outside and be comfortable, I hope we don’t slip back into too hot of weather again in 2020, because I am loving the proper Autumn temperatures.
Tip of the Week?
When my group and I were knocking out the new user stories for phase 3, our backend developer noticed that the group we are reviewing had db credentials exposed in their gitlab. While this wouldn’t be a huge concern if you have IP address whitelisting on the db, make sure you are keeping your data protected!
