Category Archives: cswsu

Introductory Post

Welcome to my blog, where I will look into various exciting new developments in the computer science field, and share my thoughts. I plan to share any thoughts or ideas regarding news I find and potentially test out small projects using them depending on my interest. Anything I create during my explorations will be shared here. I am new to blogging, so my designs and presentation will improve over time, I hope this proves interesting!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Exploring Computer Science: Ben Gelineau by Ben Gelineau and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint 3 Retrospective

            As you may hope, or expect, this final sprint is where everything really came together, and we were firing on all cylinders. We had consistent communication when needed and otherwise had tasks we could work self-sufficiently on in the meantime. Our task board was positively stuffed with tasks that expressed the minute details of our process, and we managed to complete an incredible amount of their weight considering how many there were. Having spent the first sprint unsure of what tasks actually needed doing, and the second iterating on what we had created, I believe this was the moment all the building blocks fell in place; and it felt, at least personally, that tasks were clear and specific, comprised of all the things I wished to improve from the rough iterative process mentioned in the second sprint.

            I think having finalized our UI design, or at least cemented the layout, allowed for easier improvement of said design. In many ways, having a finalized user flow in place made so that much of the non-style code could be refactored to store and manage information more effectively. For instance, as mentioned in the note above, I began with calling REST API to log transactions in the weight entry component where the necessary information would end up: student ID and weight. After refactoring, I broke both the storage and management of guests into a service which could be more easily accessed by any component and centralized any API calls made using guest information. This worked perfectly except for a single instance, where I needed this service to call another component. Services can be easily imported by components but sending information to a specific component from a service is more complicated. As I understand, the code I used subscribes the component I needed to speak to, to the service, which then can send a signal to that component, which in turn calls one of that component’s methods.

            Regarding what did not work, it is a combination of both personal and group strategy. While we each could work effectively alone on our own independent portions, it meant that we all became intimately familiar with only one or two aspects of the project. This has especially caused problems most recently with trying to move our respective portions into Docker, as I was the only one who knew next to nothing about Docker. Therefore, I could not help my group members work on any problems my front end code may have caused. I see not keeping up with my group member’s Docker progress as a personal failing. Now both in this class and in the workforce to come, I am wishing I had this knowledge of such a powerful and seemingly common framework. Otherwise, I am very proud of the work my group members did and think given some more cross-cutting training we would be that much more of an effective team. Especially given everything that has been going on we have managed to put together a site that is nearly ready to roll out. (With the caveat, of course, that it may not be absolutely perfect but can perform all the tasks necessary).

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint Two Retrospective

If the first sprint was crawling, then this sprint we moved straight to running. When considering the shorter length of the first sprint we appropriately stuck to smaller “set-up” or preparatory goals. This time, we began actually building our site in earnest. My focus, as evident from the list above, is web design and development for the UI/UX. At the beginning of this sprint, while planning, I was at a loss to quantify what exactly needed to be done. One may notice that many of these issues were posted within the last few days of this sprint. Considering I haven’t built that many websites, and none with so specific of a purpose, my thought was that I didn’t know what I needed until I had it: I would simply figure things out as I built them. This flies in the face of any good practice, and I will of course avoid such practices moving forward, but given my inexperience I had to lay the tracks in front of us as we steamed on. This manifested as an incredibly broad task, “Implement the UI from the wireframe”, with us then filling in the gaps after.

This worked, but not terribly well. It has given us a working front, albeit with some missing or broken features, but a code base desperate for refactoring. As with last semester, I often would end up learning about a useful feature after I had already beat my head against the problem and found a roundabout way of solving it. For instance, despite implementing a new directive, I did not know that services could be split off as well and shared by all components. The list of all Guest IDs, for example, would be best shared by all components instead of how it currently is implemented, which is a hodgepodge of emitters with no “real” persistence between components. It can currently pass guest IDs effectively between them, but this could be done, presumably, much easier using a service. I’m not completely certain either, it will be another instance of a new technique we’ll have to learn as we implement it, but I would have liked to have started here rather than arrive here after what will become somewhat wasted effort.

I say somewhat wasted, but in reality, it doesn’t hurt to know how to approach problems in many different ways. I believe using emitters is a valuable skill to have. Additionally, I now know at least three different ways to embed svg into a web page, with each successive one being more effective than the last but with all having their uses. I feel that I am certainly improving as a web developer, with each new misstep putting me in the direction of a better solution. However, I have a lot to learn in regard to version control systems. I caused a few headaches for poor James, who kindly walked me through all my poor practices. I know now never to push directly to the master branch for a new feature and utilize merge requests effectively. Also, never copy paste anything, because they are treated as new files even if they have the same exact content and will cause innumerable conflicts. In addition, Pawel and I ended up both independently working on the same issues, but we have discussed ways to avoid these situations moving forward. Even with all the growing pains mentioned and those involved in moving everything online, I believe we have found ways to be an effective team as well.

For this next sprint, our tasks already look much better, each containing the fine detail of work that needs to be done in order to reach our next project iteration. There are considerably more tasks, and none that are as horribly broad as many of those in this sprint. We possess a better sense of what needs to be done, and we can act upon it. By applying all the lessons learned thus far I believe we are closer and closer to something that can actually be used by the food pantry and should all be proud of that fact.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Share What You Learn: Sharing is caring

While applying this pattern to my experience feels a little presumptuous, considering people do not “look to [me] as a source of knowledge”, I have tried to share what little knowledge I have as I gain in hopes of helping my classmates with any troubles they may have. Like Kindred Spirits before, I have had good luck attacking a new topic in our individual ways first then comparing notes and filling in the gaps in our knowledge others have covered. As well, this topic reminds me of Breakable Toys as well and my misunderstanding of it, where I concluded that writing a wiki may be a helpful personal learning tool but through the lens of this pattern, sharing it could provide a collective learning tool. While I have yet to go as far as creating that wiki, I have been willing to share any knowledge I have with my classmates.

I also got a great opportunity to brush up on our major’s most difficult subject and then test my knowledge of it by being a peer assisted learning mentor for Data Structures. I realized how much I missed the first time I took the class, and when explaining it I had to shed to convenient mental tools I used for more thorough methods that I could then share with the students. I remember specifically trying to explain how to rank program running times, without taking the derivative of the function that represented the run time; as many of the students had not, and likely would not, take calculus. By the end I did feel as though I was better acquainted with the material but felt sometimes like I needed to go deeper as I had difficulties explaining some concepts well.

Another time, I remember having to give a mock lecture to another student who missed a lecture. It really pushed my understanding of the material to the limit because I could recite what I had copied into my notebook but if he needed to ask a question I could have fallen apart had I not been confident in the material, or had a good understanding of it. The book says that you may feel that “someone more experienced [should] put themselves forward”. However, many people can feel intimidated by professionals and may not be willing to ask vital questions for fear of looking foolish; as opposed to the camaraderie of peers. I think that pushing ourselves to interrogate our own knowledge of material in the presences of peers offers an excellent opportunity for growth.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Dig Deeper: Finding the Marianas Trench of knowledge

This particular pattern is quite resonant with me, or at least the context section of it, considering it describes my entire academic experience in computer science fairly well. An excellent analogy would be a lake a mile wide but a foot deep; or at least it would be but a foot is very generous to the depth of my knowledge and a mile is delusional considering the limited scope of languages and tools I am familiar with. However, the sentiment expressed in this section still holds: “You learn only enough about any tool to get today’s job done”. I’m ‘you’. It is not for a lack of interest, at least not in all the subjects we have covered, that I do not go very deep into them – it’s exclusively a matter of time and mental resources. I have found that I have only had the time and energy to cover a subject as much as it takes to complete the require work or project associated it.

An example that comes to mind was last semester when working on both a REST API and Angular web front end – and by working on, I mean learning frustratedly as quickly as possible while working with both for the first time independently. There felt like so little time that I had to at one point neglect the JDBC features built into the Spring Initializer because I simply did not have the time to dig through the documentation. I had to instead use a less efficient and redundant method I knew well. Additionally, on the front-end side, I was able to brute force a lot of scalability because it was easier to use the limited knowledge I had to write ngOnInit and onResize methods to handle window sizing; as opposed to learning built in scalability tools or utilizing CSS more effectively.

To learn these methods would have taken a considerable amount of time that I simply did not have. Luckily this semester the pace at which the site is being built is much more manageable, as is the distribution of work amongst four people. So, with this time I hope to gain a better understanding of the tools and techniques I wish to utilize, before I do so. The pattern suggests writing a blog post, unfortunately this one does not fit that prompt. Speaking of which, I find the idea of going back to read a technological paper from 1976 to be a massive waste of time – but that’s just me. Regardless, and as always, I will seek a more reasonable middle ground between the pattern and what I find effective.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Practice, Practice, Practice: No, not that Dave Thomas

While this pattern is excellent advice, as the title suggests, I could not help but get distracted by the quotes and advice offered by Dave Thomas. Of course, it was nothing substantive that he was saying just that I could not get the Wendy’s founder, also Dave Thomas, out of my head. As for the actual substance of this particular section, it falls into the category of things I am trying to do more consistently in my academic life. Despite being kind of nerdy romanticized, and potentially misapplied, karate jargon; it is effective enough in conveying the idea of lessons, or more accurately patterns, that should be practiced often. Obviously, the linchpin of these lessons is that they are done in private where you can fail gracefully, a common concept in many of these patterns.

Regarding how I apply these patterns, I use a site called codewars where these exercises are also called kata but are done in a web IDE and can be checked for functionality within seconds. As well, all the solutions done by users can be searched, so one can “compare notes” with other users and see what, often insanely truncated, solutions others reached. This fulfills the dojo aspect of these coding exercises as well. If ever you were looking to apply a pattern most directly, this is it – and I hope other students will use this resource. While I don’t believe the site allows users to create their own kata like the pattern says, they do have a suggestion section in the forums. After long hours of honing your skills you could dream something up to really test yourself and others.

This pattern is related to a favorite of mind, Breakable Toys; and not unreasonably so, many of these exercise are incredibly difficult and I have found myself dropping them into my own IDE to finish off at my own pace apart from the web IDE. As mentioned previously, the school and work schedule I maintain makes it a little difficult to keep up with these exercises, or completely them consistently enough. However, I believe that have read this pattern, being set to graduate, and barreling towards my graduation and subsequent career, I do not want to neglect any practice I can get.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Use the Source: how to numb your mind faster than a lobotomy

Perhaps it’s just naturally a trait of mine, a coincidence growing up, or perhaps I more broadly reflect societies supposedly shrinking attention span; regardless of the cause, I have very little patience for reading documentation. Instead, I often like to open a sample project, usually the placeholder created by default, and see what happens when changing things around, or how information is passed between files. As such, I oftentimes find roundabout ways of completing tasks in a new language or framework. This results in less than ideal code, even if functioning, that does not follow best practice or any convention the language/framework may have. So therefore, the “Use the Source” spoke to a weakness I have in software development.

It states that one should choose a complex, and necessarily open source, project in the language you are hoping to learn to fork and pore over. In doing so, one can internalize as many of the lessons this code may have to teach, the ways experts write in this language, the “tricks of the trade” if you will; and, as a result, be inspired to apply these concepts in ones own project. This unfortunately, sounds terribly boring. It’s hard enough for me, and many other students I know, to pick apart our own code only months after writing it. I can’t imagine trying to parse years of work by developers with an incredible knowledge of their chosen language. This seems like a recipe for frustration. I could easily see a student not unlike myself throwing themselves at a new language in this fashion and coming away discouraged and maybe even completely overwhelmed; to the point where they may shy away from learning that language at all.

Instead, I would propose a healthier middle ground. I find that in messing with the code you can find little victories where your exploration paid off – victories that, for myself at least, keep me motivated. However, as mentioned previously, learning completely on ones own may waste valuable time and internalize bad or inefficient habits. As such, I think one should push their abilities as far as they can manage, then seek guidance from communities online. There exist thousands of YouTube tutorials and stack overflow threads where more than one solution is reached to nearly every problem; so, unlike the open source project, you can pick a solution that has a logic you understand best and can implement. I may have no patience to dig through years of documentation, but I don’t lack the patience to instead experiment and ultimately learn the language/framework.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Deep End: Taking off my floaters

The definition of many of the apprenticeship patterns in the book are all in their title, being fairly obvious or sharing language used in idioms or other expressions. However, despite this, our authors usually find a way to expand on them for at least a page or two – most often by sharing a relevant story. Which is why I was shocked at how brief this particular pattern was, just a handful of paragraphs and another for our story. The brevity of pattern however did not lessen its impact on me, and I have come away with a renewed confidence. As someone who needs structure in order to work effectively, I imagine the deep end would involve a great deal of work and specifically responsibility – which I respond to quite well also.

I had already determined to seek out an internship or entry level position outside of my home state. Further, I wanted to join a company where I, of course, could be actually hired but one that would truly test the limits of my skills. Ideally, I would want it to be an internship though, cause as much as I want to make this change in scenery, I’m still hesitant to get stuck someplace I’m miserable. I think the true test will not just be getting a position away from home but finding a place for myself in that new place and maybe even gaining the confidence to stay and accept a job at the company – in the case of an internship.

I did find one internship that states that they will make no “intern-work” and one should be expected to work as a peer with the rest of their fellow employees; and on a massively used and well-known mobile application no less. I jumped at the chance to apply for this position, and I am incredibly hopeful I get it, as it is the perfect storm of conditions I am hoping for. Enrique’s story is still a little too dramatic for me to imagine emulating, but I hope if the opportunity to work in another country even presents itself, I will have the confidence to take it.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Kindred Spirits: Programming inspired by Anne of Green Gables

When reading the kindred spirits apprenticeship pattern, I was immediately reminded of my first real programming class, CS140, wherein I met some of the friendly faces I would spend the next two years becoming a programmer with. A few of these faces were a part of my group in that class’s lab and with them we challenged each other in the subject and helped fill each other’s blind spots. While this is hardly unique, I’m sure, it exemplifies what the pattern is all about: finding peers who you can learn and grow with. Now with those two years nearly behind us and the end (of our education) is in sight, those same friends have been amazing resources.

As new learners, we tend to go in all different directions, not favoring any set method because we have yet to find the path of least resistance or best practices. Subsequently, we create puzzles pieces with our bits of knowledge that we all can combine to get a clear picture of a language, framework, et cetera. I have found as well, that what was often very useful was the ability to politely disagree – read: bicker like an old couple – with your peer and push back and forth on each other to really challenge one’s knowledge or understanding of something. It was through this back and forth that many of the solutions we were so desperately searching for came about; which is something the pattern even addresses, stating that it is imperative to avoid group think and challenge each other.

I remember distinctly have an erratic mass of code segments and illustrations of a particular data structure, the exact one I cannot remember, all over the board in the Science and Technology center study rooms. Data Structures, our major’s trial by fire, has crushed fledgling programmers of far greater skill than me. I can say with no doubt, that had it not been for these brain-storming sessions I would not have passed that class or even completely the projects thoroughly in the way that I eventually did. As I look forward to internships and even jobs after graduation, I hope to keep those around me who I have learned so much from and find new kindred spirits to take on this next chapter of my programming career.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Craft Over Art: or how I learned to stop worrying and love my ugly UI

As I mentioned last week, I have a tendency to try to make products out of projects; meaning I can’t just have something to tinker with for fun, it needs to essentially be a rough draft for the actual project I have to work on. In the same vein, I have another hang-up on wanting things to be clean and pretty to start. Now, of course, one should strive for well formatted code following best practices, but specifically for those projects with a user interface I try to go straight to a finished product from the start. As a result, the Craft Over Art Pattern was illuminating, bringing into focus where my priorities should lie especially in contrast to where they are currently.

In sum, this pattern emphasizes that you have been charged with creating a functioning product, not necessarily a pretty one. The line, “the things we build for customers can be beautiful, but must be useful” says it all. I realize in constantly polishing a project before its feature complete, I end up throwing away a lot of work spent on “dolling up” features or elements of the user interface that may change or not even be used. I even caught myself making the same mistake even on a personal project using a different web application language, where I did not even attempt to make any forms or methods that communicated to the backend, instead spending time adding libraries for user interface elements that look nice and animate well. While there is certainly a place for those things, this pattern helps one understand that is when you have all of the parts of your application finalized.

I should have learned this lesson last semester with my final project. I spent so much time fiddling with the color palette and page animations, that the content on those pages was barren, or poorly formatted. It is nice, I think, that my webpage looks and animates nicely, but when pages break upon reloading then it hardly matters. If there is constantly some expectation of failure with a project, then the font you choose is hardly relevant. I think that is what this pattern helped me realize most about this weakness of mine; utility is the most important aspect of software, everything else is so much fluff.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Press Here for Worms by wurmpress and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.