CS373 Spring 2021 Week 11: Yuhan Zheng

What did you do this past week?

This past week I had several meetings with my team to discuss our implementation of sorting, filtering, and searching. We thought about implementing these features on the backend, but after more research and testing, we eventually decided to do everything on the front end. We also moved pagination to the front end so that it made more sense with our current design.

What’s in your way?

After getting our grade back from the last phase, we noticed some issues with our site and our design that need to be changed. Also, I want to change the python tests to use mock DB/mock queries, so we can get some extra points in this phase.

What will you do next week?

By next week, we should have already finished everything that needs to be implemented in the current phase, so I will start to look at things that we should do in the next phase. Besides, we’ll do more refactoring to improve both the appearance and the functionalities of your website. Other than that, we will wait for feedback from the graders and our customer team.

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

I think it is very insightful and emphasizes the danger of exposing implementation details to the users. I have written classes with getter and setter methods when learning about OOD, but at the time I thought they were “safe” since users would not have direct access to the private fields. However, looking back at it with ideas brought up in this article, these methods should be avoided whenever possible. We can almost always let these functions return objects instead of private fields which will be much safer and will improve the maintainability of the program.

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

I don’t have much experience working with a database before, but lectures this week clearly explained what these operations do. I was a little confused on how to implement select with a python class before, but after seeing the solution, it all made sense, and I was able to implement the other operations in python when doing in-class exercises. I also think it is interesting to see how powerful theta join can be if we just provide it with the right binary predicate.

What made you happy this week?

The weather was really nice on Saturday, so my friend and I spent some time outside and explored a new area in our city.

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

My tip-of-the-week is to use the inspect feature when testing the look of your website in chrome. It has a feature that allows you to see how the site will look on screens in various sizes.