CS 373 Spring 2021 Week of Apr 5–11:
1 ) What did you do this past week?
I had 2 exams this week. One of them went alright, waiting on results for the other.
For the IDB project, I worked on restructuring parts of the frontend, and redoing both the home and about pages. I also fixed a couple bugs in the process. The website is slowly coming together, but we are still behind for getting the search working on our pages and the highlighting.
2 ) What’s in your way?
I have a couple of deadlines for other class projects coming up next week right before this project is due. I need to contact my team again about what they want to do for the testing and schedule a time for meetings. I also need to do some research into how to do text highlighting for the search results.
3 ) What will you do next week?
Next week I need to fix more bugs on the website. I will also be working on making search run, and highlighting. I am not sure about how to get search working for the grid, but our table library can handle search for the tables.
4) If you read it, what did you think of Why getter and setter methods are evil?
I have always disliked making getters and setters for no reason. One of my first CS teachers (not at UT) made them mandatory without much reason behind their decision. Most getter/setter functionality can be replaced with making modular code with proper design between the classes, so creating them shouldn’t be a standard practice.
5 ) What was your experience of select, project, cross join and theta join?
With me being familiar with SQL queries, select, project, and the joins were easy to understand. I was however a little confused at first with select. In SQL, select identifies the columns to be returned, while in the python examples, it returned rows that matched the function. Project did the same as select, but for columns. It makes sense that cross join essentially multiplies the rows since we create every combination possible. Theta join is like cross join, but a condition also has to be met.
6 ) What made you happy this week?
I played Scythe with my roommates. It is a strategy board game that can take multiple hours to finish. I didn’t do well this time, but I used a different strategy that made the game interesting.
I hosted a modded minecraft server (again) for my friends. There was a couple of problems with hosting it since my usual strategy was down, but I found a way to get it working. It was fun to watch them mess around on it.
7 ) What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
On the frontend, my team is moving away from using any of the default html elements. The bootstrap elements just feel better, and work better together than if we were using div’s around containers. I would recommend replacing the plain html since bootstrap can handle extra things like scaling. When the bootstrap css isn’t working, you can easily add a css class to it to fix it. We have not yet come to needing to make a custom element, but I’m sure that some bootstrap library has that functionality built in.