Monthly Archives: February 2017

Week 2: 24 January – 30 January 2017

Throughout this week we had much to learn and only a couple cards in our Trello board.

  • Create an OpenMRS ID
    • Easy
  • Post introduction in Welcome thread
  • Install WebStorm IDE and Atom
    • Easy, atom for now I like the experience better. Much more customized
  • Angular Tour of Heroes Tutorial

All but the Angular tour of Heroes was easy, the angular tutorial really was weird to me and retried twice and got it to work fine. It must have been a small syntax error. Taylor has been managing well keeping us in tip top shape!

From the blog CS443 – Triforce Code| Exploring and Learning by CS443 – Triforce Code| Exploring and Learning and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder Chapter 3 & 4

Saying Yes:

Even though it might be important for you to know when to say “no,” it is just as, if not more important to say “yes.” You will need to learn the language of commitment. The three parts to making a commitment are to “say that you’ll do it,” “mean it,” and “actually doing it.” This chapter helped me learn that using this language of commitment, you can figure out what someone is saying by noticing the words they use. It is rare when people say something, that they actually mean it. and will get it done. Some other people will mean the things that they say, but will still never get them done. And last but not least, there are those people that will commit to big promises and will never even mean to get them done. Specifically, if you want to know signs of non commitment, they can include, using the words “need/should,” “hope/wish,” and “lets.” Chances are that if these words are being used, that the person doesn’t feel that it is feasible to do these tasks or even if they just don’t mean it. Starting to use these language tricks instead of following your gut can help you tremendously in your professional career and help you understand if people really mean what they say or not. This helped me realize that subconsciously sometimes I will have a task at hand that I will want to have done by a certain time, but sometimes might not be able to, and that it might be because of non-commitment to myself, by either not believing that I will be able to finish certain parts or even have it straight undone. I need to understand and not overestimate how much overtime I can put into a certain project.

Coding:

We also learned about when to and when not to code. It talks about how it is either good or bad thing depending on the level of focus or concentration you have on the topic. Since coding can be a strenuous activity, it can require you to juggle a couple different factors together at once. These factors could include things like having your code actually work. Secondly, your code must solve the problem, given to you by the customer. Your code your fit well into the system that you already have, and most importantly, your code must be readable and understandable by others. Not concentrating o these factors can have you exposed to distractions that otherwise would not be present in your team of developers if you were organized. Even if you try to ignore these things and code your way anyway, the code you come up with will be wrong. It will be convoluted and filled with bugs and it wouldn’t really solve the customer’s problem so it will have to be redone. Much like being tired or distracted, or even having the time be really late like 3 am, do not code, it will not come out as well as you plan it to. Professionalism can be related to the amount of hours and dedication you put into it. It can be seen i your work. But also we are warned about coding in “the zone.” It will have you lose sight of your big picture and have you seeing tunnel vision. This chapter helped me realize, that no matter what, and no matter how good you are, your life will always involve throwing your curve balls and challenges as you code, you will just need to find fixes and ways around it to come up with good code but it can always be done and distractions can be put to the minimum.

From the blog CS@worcester – CS Blog by Gautam by csblogbyg and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder Chapters 3&4

The importance of saying yes is something that many take for granted. This is the general theme of chapter 3. The reason Robert Martin of The Clean Coder, uses this chapter to talk about saying yes is to compliment and explain in a professional context the act of agreeing to take on work etc. I think much of this book is common sense on how to act, yet it was refreshing to have a rubric to see what your agreement means to the other person or organization you are working with. This could be even an agreement with yourself. When you agree to take on work its a test of character and really shows what your word is worth and I like this point of doing what you say.

Now Chapter 4 is another animal…it has many points brought up by many classes in the past. Everything from working too late/hard/too much, to what to when you are late on a project. These are great points to take to heart for my career and I hope I can reflect many of these perfectly throughout my career. I definitely find this chapter useful, I can tell that this author thinks TDD is the only way to clean code :D.

From the blog CS443 – Triforce Code| Exploring and Learning by CS443 – Triforce Code| Exploring and Learning and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 2: Reflections

This past week most of my time was spent on setting up the environment for Angular 2 and starting to use it in small applications. I ran in to a small snag while setting up the environment, after installing nodejs and npm I was getting an issue running the server. This was resolved by installing the package nodejs-legacy. I also spent some time on various tutorials. As a group we did set up a number of tools that we will be using through the semester to organize the scrum team. We are using Slack for most of our communications including daily Scrum meetings as it is not possible to meet. We are using Trello to organize our sprints with a board for the project backlog, the sprint backlog, and the completed tasks. I was also looking in to some Trello power ups that would help with the burn down chart.

My first impressions of Angular 2 were pretty positive. I like the system that is use to run the development web server. It reminds me a lot of Python’s Django. The sever is also nice as it processes the files as you save them. This means you have more freedom when it comes to text editors and IDE’s.

From the blog CS@WSU – :(){ :|: & };: by rmurphy12blog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Yes; but sometimes, maybe. (Clean Coder Week 2: Ch 3 & 4

The previous chapters in the Clean Coder book talked about professionalism and saying no. This week, the book zooms in how “saying yes” and coding principles that might be useful to follow. Before going into the chapters, something I’ve realized that I hate but also love about this book is the fact that is partially opinionated. What I mean by that is, for example, in chapter 3 the author talks about the different situations and scenarios in which you would say yes and really mean it and other situations where you might not want to say yes because you know you might not be committed to it. In this case, its pretty much straight facts in the sense that the chapter only talks about saying yes and the commitment that comes with it. There’s not really anything that is up for debate. On the contrary, in chapter 4 the author talks about coding principles that he believes one should follow to become a better professional and to write good-clean code. However, in this chapter it is more opinionated because not everything he talks about is applicable to all programmers. There are some tips that he gives that may work for one programmer but may not work for other programmers.

Going back to my original thought; the reason why I hate and love this style of book is because even though it provides facts, there are also times where you as a reader have to determine for yourself if what he is saying is applicable to your style of programming so its not just another book that is just a computer science textbook, its somewhat like a conversation where sometimes you agree and sometimes you disagree.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tan Trieu's Blog by tanminhtrieu and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.