CS 373 Fall 2020: Week of 12 Oct — 18 Oct

What did you do this past week?

This past week I had my test for CS 373 which ended up going surprisingly well (looks like all that studying paid off)! I studied for that earlier this week and then after the test concluded on Thursday evening, we went straight to work on Phase 2 of the IDB Project. So far we have most of the database built (including the linking tables) and have planned out how we will structure our API calls as well.

What’s in your way?

We need to finish the database and linking tables by today and start planning how we will have Flask running to service our API calls. We also need to work with the frontend to ensure that we are properly formatting our data since they will use our API calls to load the data onto the website. We also need to figure out how we will end up using either psycopg or sqlalchemy to query the database for the proper records upon request.

What will you do next week?

The deadline for Phase 2 was actually pushed back a day upon request and those 24 hours will be really helpful since I’ve had 3 midterms in the past week. The beginning of the week will be focused on finishing Phase 2 and then I need to start getting on that recruiting grind as well. After Tuesday, I feel like my workload will be a lot lighter than it is right now.

If you read it, what did you think of The Liskov Substitution Principle?

It was definitely an interesting read and builds off of the previous article we had to read about the Open-Closed Principle. The article focused on inheritance and derived classes as well as the importance of adding that extra layer of abstraction so that on the outside, users can work with the derived class as if it is the base class.

What was your experience of Test #1?

Test #1 went pretty well. At first, I was nervous when I had to learn the functionality of * in Python on the fly but after that, it was much easier and more tied to what we have been covering in class. The second part of the test was much smoother after the first part of the test since I had an idea and expectation of what the test would look like (until the first part I was unsure of how exactly the format would be).

What made you happy this week?

I am happy to have finished all of my exams this week (that was an insanely huge relief). I guess this is the main midterm season since for two of my classes, I don’t have any more tests until the final. I’ve also been getting a lot of HackerRanks and those are always fun to work through (hopefully they lead to an actual offer though).

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

My huge tip-of-the-week would be about using Python for scripting whenever you can honestly. For this, the Python docs can be very useful as, in our case, I wrote a script in Python which can parse a JSON file (results from an external RESTful API), ask which instance to capture, and then write the correctly formatted record to a CSV file. This file can then be uploaded to the database to fill in the values of a table instead of manually. So figuring out how to work with JSON and CSV made referencing the Python documentation essential, at least in my case.