This pattern focuses on the idea of establishing yourself in one language that you may be able to base your career in the future, to better prepare yourself for when you get to the career you want to obtain. The most fundamental aspect from the pattern was the community side of learning a language as it states that you become a part of a much larger community of programmers who share their knowledge and even their code for the sake of helping each other learn and grow as developers.

            In my Experience I thought if I learned a lot of different languages, I could have the experience needed to land any job I wanted too as I had my foot in more languages than one, but what I didn’t realize is that being a good at one language is better than being decent at many. This was not only reenforced by the pattern discussed here but when I met with a family friend who is a developer at staples, he also dropped that bit of wisdom on me as he too thought that was but as he got closer to starting his career, he focused on mastering java, and it has steered him into a very lucrative job.

            Going back to the community aspect the reading mentions how having such large community that works from the same language allows for beginners to have more experienced programmers share the small tricks that they have learned in their experience to give the newer developers a boost in learning. There is a sense of passing the torch in a community like this which you rarely see in other industries, and it is refreshing the lengths that people will go for the sake of knowledge.

            Another useful aspect in the reading was the use of testing early on into learning a new language, as I was relatively new to coding when I started my degree, I went based on what the curriculum that the classes had for what projects I worked on. If I had started testing my knowledge earlier on and working on my own projects based on the language that we were learning on my own time I would have accelerated my experience with java.

From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Two of the fundamental aspects of coding, Abstraction and composition, are discussed thoroughly in this blog as well as the overall impact these processes can have on the code as a whole, we discussed these two towards the beginning of the classes and how they have there rolls in being able to not only code better but to understand and lay out the structure of the code.

At first I didn’t really understand how reducing a problem to its most basic form could help when I need to make code to very Specific actions and work a certain way, however after utilizing those processes in order to simplify the problem, then follow up by building up from those basic models allows me to utilize basic code to solve my more advanced problems. This opened up my thought Process when it came to Writing code as now I could think of all of the previous Projects I had where I had to create multiple objects and set Attributes for each specific one, and now I could seamlessly do it on a larger scale reusing other basic code.

For abstraction, it is the process of reducing all of the but the most important details in the code and leaving all of the extra out, it is important as it all owes for the most basic process to be worked on, and then subsequent work can be delegated to the more advanced versions of that the problem. an Example would be to rather than making multiple functions for different things, we could makes basic function that can be implemented repeatedly and reused. We can look at an example of the duck Project where we looked at different models of these classes and we noticed that certain ducks needed specific flying actions or squeaking actions, so rather than making multiple classes for multiple different types of ducks we made a basic duck class and created specializations for them In order to better the overall structure and reduce clutter. Then the using Composition you may make the connections to the different Objects in order to share information. Using the Duck Project Again, we made different types of ducks with Connections being made to the main Duck class with all of the Parameters, then we made connections for the squeak and Fly behaviors.

The Writer Focus on some key Traits for Good Abstractions, that being Simple, Concise, and Reusable. These are the things to look for when you want to simplify the work you do.

Elliott, Eric. “Abstraction & Composition.” Medium, JavaScript Scene, 28 May 2020, https://medium.com/javascript-scene/abstraction-composition-cb2849d5bdd6.

From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

One of the most Relevant and important aspects of programming that I have neglected for a while is commenting and proper technical Writing, when I first started out I figured I would just remember all of the changes I would make to my code and didn’t require the small notes in-between methods. later on I began to understand the importance when I began working with many different files that needed to work in tandem and couldn’t remember what each method I wrote did or how it worked in the system as a whole.

In this blog the author Goes over many of the different aspects of technical Writing from either commenting on each method to adding context to the code overall, the biggest take away I got from it is that code without Comments is Worthless, by reading the documentation you should be able to understand why the previous engineers made changes or added functionality to the code. this allows for other developers to come in and quickly understand what is going on and be able to delete or insert sections of code in order to continue the development cycle.

the Writer goes on to show many different examples with one being a sequence diagram that gives the step by step explanation of what the Sequence of the systems in play, much like the different design architectures we discussed in a previous class where it shows the link between user and the database. The Importance of this kind of writing is that it can convey the was the system is supposed to work together so if another developer were come along and look over the schema they would understand the process and be able to work off of that.

Oliveira, Vincent. “HOW TO WRITE Good Software Technical Documentation.” Medium, Medium, 15 June 2022, https://medium.com/@VincentOliveira/how-to-write-good-software-technical-documentation-41880a0e7814.

From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The blog I reviewed this week delves deeper on the topic of design smells and the classifications of some of them in different situations, some of which we had discussed in previous classes and some new ones that prove to be important to know in the long run. this article focus on design smells in the UI/UX side of programming and more specific to this side but still very much important.

The first discussed is “Documentation for Power users” which is the separate documentation used on portals to different sights when users click hyperlinks, or the different section on a Website or application. the issue comes from the formating and the flow of said website many look very cluttered and the flow of information is jumbled up. One specific example that is used for this smell is the Use of Microsoft Excel, the main focus being that it is a universally used application and thus has universal tools that the users disposal, the issue with such a great tool as without distinct tools being separated from the ones a user might not use in order to optimize the users experience it overwhelms them. this goes for all users as there is no case by case optimization, one solution brought up would be to dissect the application into separate products in order to better organize the UI for consumers in different situations, such as one made for educational use and one for corporate.

Another Smell that is discussed and closely relates to the previous is “Excessive Iconography”, this smell focuses on the use of unclear icons to display information in large loads, if we look at the example used in the blog of Xcode on Mac with many of the icons and labels out all on the same display to overwhelm the developer, making the tasks more difficult. the issue isn’t that the Labels or the Icons are not clear, but there are to many options and features present on the same screen. one way to combat this is to structure the application into smaller instances including all features that are connected together, allowing for clearer labeling and better overall experience for users. one personal example of this kind of structure I found was on Jira which structured its features according to what the user needed, allowing for a seemless UI and better experience. it did this but hiding features entirely that were not necessary and clearly labeling its tools.

Yodaiken, Aaron. “Ux Smells.” Medium, UX Collective, 7 Feb. 2017, https://medium.com/user-experience-design-1/ux-smells-fa971feef820.

From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Blog I read this week focusses on the the different Types of software architecture that we had discussed in previous classes as well as the different situations that these different patterns are useful and for what type of situation they would be ideal for. One of the important ones discussed and the most interesting ones that applies to my everyday life is the client server pattern.

In this pattern a central server offers one or more services are offered to one or more clients, allowing for all of the work to be done at the central server while all of the users can use the Data independently. This is very relevant for the world at large as many of the sites that we use on a day to day basis use this type of pattern such as twitter, where the Application provided the under interface for the user and the servers to interact. this type of pattern is used for many different applications we use today such as facebook and many other types of social media, where the user takes the information from the server and the selections made on the users side will then be sent to the server and update the information on that side of it. it is interesting how our small interaction impacts the overall system as a whole and how the entire process occurs for something so simple as updating your twitter bio.

Another pattern discussed in the blog is the layers pattern, which we discussed in both classes related to Cohesion as well as design patterns. it is described as the most widely used and promotes low coupling and high cohesion, much of what we discussed before hand in class is gone over such is how it is utilized for the most part smaller projects with different teams working on different parts of the project in parallel with other departments in order to keep the system active for users as well as allowing for updates to be spit out more often without shutting down the rest of the system. this was an important aspect of release principles as allowing for these releases to happen frequently in order to push updates to users as often as possible while other developments were also in progressed proved beneficial to the user but strained the developers, with the different teams it allows for less stress on devs to release patches or updates in select parts of the projects.

O, Williams. “Fundamental Software Architectural Patterns.” Medium, Medium, 14 June 2022, https://medium.com/@liams_o/fundamental-software-architectural-patterns-663440c5f9a5.

From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this week I wanted to dive a little deeper on the APIs that we has begin to work with in the previous lab, it interested me how these systems work and wanted to see how different examples out in the world worked and how it related to how we interact with the systems themselves.

In the blog the author goes deep into how the API System are very apparent throughout the world and how they work, the best example I saw was a calendar system on google. The user would send a request to googles remote server and then the server would respond with the site to allow the user too book on the calendar, one the user set the date the request would be sent back to the server and a response would be sent back to the user. As someone who uses other systems like booksy to book haircuts with my barber its interesting how the API allows me to book it on my end while it does all of the work for me interacting with the server and changing my barbers calendar to integrate my appointment.

In the case of the work we did in the lab it is interesting to see how the API used for the pantry relates to some of the APIs discussed in the blog, when we worked we saw the all of the different actions in that API which led to either the collection as a whole or individual students when we looked to post new details or retrieve details. It is interesting to see how similarly the example we worked on works with the blogs APIs, where ours is more adding students taking food or putting food in the pantry, while also logging what is taken or what is put in, there examples is access to a Weather API to check weather in certain areas or the facebook API to give the user their profiles information.

One part that the Blog focuses on heavily is Object Oriented design, where there is a large list of objects and each object has an API which allows the objects to interact with one another, much of what is said leads back to our earlier lab seasons focusing on the different design models and which ones work better, the API aspect of it is now made relevant on how these objects interact with each-other on the users side.

Gazarov, Petr. “What Is an API? in English, Please.” Medium, We’ve Moved to FreeCodeCamp.org/News, 10 Oct. 2016, https://medium.com/free-code-camp/what-is-an-api-in-english-please-b880a3214a82.

From the blog cs@worcester – Marels Blog by mbeqo and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.