CS373 Blog 16 Nov — 22 Nov
What did you do this past week?
For phase 4 of our project, I spent my time cleaning up some frontend code and getting a new page ready for visualizations. Aside from routing that and giving it a nice layout, I took care of one visualization. Our team is planning on doing a video for our presentation, so that should get going as soon as possible.
What’s in your way?
Our biggest hurdle has been dealing with our provider’s API. Sadly it is heavily tailored only for their own site (for example using page as a query parameter) and we have also been struggling on how to visualize what data they do have. Thankfully, we met and came up with a couple of ideas that will hopefully pan out for that portion of the project.
What will you do next week?
For this project, we want to take care of the video presentation, but my main focus is on Turkey day and having a much needed break for a few days once I get past Tuesday. I have some obligations for other classes which will almost definitely take precedence over the material for Software Engineering.
What did you think of “What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You”?
The stories offered many reasons to be disappointed with the cultural norms in Computing, but I am glad that I can see those behaviors for what they are and have the power to work towards much needed change. I think it is important to remind CS students of the gender and racial biases which taint many fields, so that we can be more vigilant in making our generation of programmers more ethical than the last.
What was your experience of refactoring?
Whereas the frequent examples for SQL felt really useful to give us a lot of practice with the new toolkit, many of the refactoring examples felt pointless or counter-productive. I think I would have had a much better time if the reasoning behind many of the refactors were better explained. It makes sense that it is nice to remove some getters and setters, but I was confused by some moves which seemingly fractured our code too far and added unnecessary overhead to the same operations.
What made you happy this week?
I had my birthday on November 17th! I finally got around to a small celebration with a small number of friends this last Saturday and it was a great time. We made a really nice brunch at our apartment and then had a pleasant afternoon at Zilker. It helped clear my head and definitely made me happy.
What’s your pick-of-the-week?
My tip is to look into Recharts. While setting up the ability to use d3 in React is not the worst task in the world, Recharts offers a highly customizable way of putting those same d3-based charts onto your site without dealing with hooks and potentially buggy javascript for it.
