CS373 Spring 2021 Week 7: Yuhan Zheng

1.What did you do this past week?

This week I worked on Phase 1 of the IDB project with my team and finished all the tasks on Saturday. I’ve never worked with React, Javascript, and CSS before, so I learned a lot of new things while creating and refining the pages of our website.

2. What’s in your way?

The next phase of the project involves MySQL and implementing our RESTful API. Thus, I will start to look for some tutorials on MySQL to refresh my memory and some instructions on how to implement an API. I will also communicate with my team and try to schedule our next meeting soon.

3. What will you do next week?

Next week I will meet up with my team and plan out how we want to divide up tasks for Phase 2. Once we decide where we should start, I will get started on my part and keep my teammates updated via Teams.

4. If you read it, what did you think of the Open-Closed Principle?

I really like the ideas that this article brings up and highlights. In particular, I agree that it is very important to take advantage of possible abstractions when designing a piece of code. Having appropriate abstractions help programmers to maintain the code and leave reasonable rooms for future extension of features. I will definitely keep the open-closed principle in mind when working on later projects.

5. What was your experience of iterators and reduce2?

I have worked with iterators in Java and C++, and I often find them come in handy when I need to traverse through a data type that cannot be indexed. One other important use case of iterators that I learned during the lecture is that they allow the same data to be traversed in multiple instances at the same time. I think reduce2 is a great modification of the simple reduce function since it can easily handle more input edge cases.

6. What made you happy this week?

My friends and I are planning a short trip that will happen later this month. I am excited to meet them since we haven’t been able to hang out for a long time.

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

My tip-of-the-week: For this project, it is helpful to plan out how and when you all want each task to be done at the beginning of each phase or the end of each group meeting. For my team, since our members are in time zones that are pretty far apart, we don’t have a lot of time to have group meetings where everyone can be present. Thus, I find it pretty effective to do this kind of planning periodically to make sure everyone is on the same page.