URLs:
Article on SOLID: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/solid-principles-explained-in-plain-english/
Video mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-6N3bLgYyQ

One video has always caught my attention because it clearly illustrates why SOLID principles are so important. I will reference two sources in this post for better understanding, in case you want to explore the topic further. However, I kindly ask you to watch the video linked at the beginning for my comments to make sense.

I chose an article to complement the video because it offers a more approachable explanation of SOLID principles and, as stated, explains them in plain English. The video features a dad following instructions from his kids to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The issue here is that such a task may have become so automatic for us that we no longer think about every single detail involved.

How is that related to programming and SOLID principles? Well, it’s quite similar. At its core, code consists of lines and lines of instructions written for a machine to execute. To achieve the intended goal, these instructions must be precise and correct; otherwise, we can encounter numerous issues. As the video demonstrates, the lack of precision in the kids’ instructions led to some funny outcomes: first, the dad stacked two slices of bread on top of each other without doing anything else. In another instance, he ended up with a piece of bread with a “bit” of peanut butter on it, a whole bottle of jelly, and another slice of bread on top.

Did I just make a typo by saying a bottle of jelly was between two slices of bread? No, that did happen. This highlights what occurs when you assign certain instructions—or, in programming, functions (Single Responsibility Principle)—more than one purpose or intent. While a peanut butter and jelly sandwich recipe might not fully embody all five SOLID principles, the Single Responsibility Principle (S in SOLID) alone is enough to demonstrate the importance of clear and focused design in coding.

The lack of clarity and precision in the sandwich instructions led to various unwanted results. Although the instructions made sense to the kids, they didn’t work well for anyone else. Similarly, when writing code—whether for homework, work, or even personal projects—these principles should never be overlooked. I believe following such practices is part of a developer’s ethical responsibility.

At the end of the day, even if I’m the one reviewing my code a year later, I might struggle to understand it without proper adherence to these principles. You might wonder, “How is it possible not to understand what you wrote yourself?” Well, that’s exactly what happened to me yesterday while refactoring some old code. I encountered several parts that I couldn’t make sense of, so I had to revise and apply these principles to make them comprehensible.

From the blog CS@Worcester – CS Today by Guilherme Salazar Almeida Nazareth and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Software testing is verifying that a software product performs the way it is designed to.  The benefits of software testing are preventing errors or bugs from being in a program. When doing software testing, it is best to do testing during the start of a build, during the build, and after the deployment or release of a program. Through doing software testing, developers and companies can ensure there are no defects, or issues before releasing or prompting a product. If there are bugs or defects in company products, there is going to be a loss in customers and money. Some of the different types of software testing include acceptance testing, unit testing, and security testing. Acceptance testing is ensuring that a coding program runs and that there are no errors. Unit testing is testing parts of a program instead of testing a whole program. In  Unix systems programming class, I was exposed to unit testing in homework projects, where I had to write parts of a program and receive a grade for each part, and couldn’t move forward until receiving full credit on a part of a program. Unit testing can lead to fewer errors than acceptance testing. It is a better practice to test your code small bits at a time than to run a whole program. Security testing is ensuring that software programs are safe from hackers that could lead to being denied access to your software, or your software working incorrectly.

Software testing was first developed after the ending of world war two. Computer scientist Tom Kilburn wrote the first piece of software by performing mathematical calculations. Debugging was the main testing strategy at the time. By the 1980’s there were other strategies of software application testing outside of fixing bugs and errors. The process of software testing includes determining a testing method to use, developing test cases or setting up requirements for the test, writing scripts or parts of a program, analyzing test results, and writing a report. For large software programs, there are tools used to complete tasks and work on running tests for different tasks, with instant feedback on what works or not works for a program. Through reporting and analytics, teams can present their results in a dashboard, which would allow everyone to see the overall result of a project. Reporting results show how testing the product leads to the result. 

Blog url: https://www.ibm.com/topics/software-testing

From the blog CS@Worcester – jonathan's computer journey by Jonathan Mujjumbi and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week, as we’ve been learning a lot more about Git and different features of it, I decided to find an article that talks about different commands that we may have not used and what they do. The article I found titled “Modern Git Commands and Features You Should Be Using” by Martin Heinz, explains some newer(ish) commands in Git that people still may not know about or just hardly ever use.

He opens up with the switch and restore commands but these are commands we’ve already learned about and used, so I’m going to skip over these.

The first one he mentions that I had not heard of is “sparse-checkout”. If you have a large repo with many different individual directories, it can cause certain commands to run extremely slow such as the normal “checkout” command or the “Status” command. With sparse-checkout, you can configure git to only checkout files in a specific directory. You would then use sparse-checkout set to download or checkout that specific directory. As you can see, this would be extremely useful in scenarios where you have a massive repo with a large amount of directories. Being able to specifically select the directories you want, rather than having to deal with all of them on more generalized git commands can be a huge time saver which is certainly a value many programmers hold highly.

Another command he mentions, which I find to be extremely cool and probably one of the most useful commands I’ve seen is “bisect”. Essentially, you run a “git bisect start” command linking a commit that does not work, as well as the last known working commit. Bisect will find the halfway point between these two commits, and you can either say “Good” or “Bad” depending on whether or not the commit is selects works or doesn’t. From there, it will keep on going halfway until it finds the exact commit where the errors that stopped the code from working started. This seems to be an extremely useful and honestly just cool command as it makes the process of finding the issues within a given program a million times easier. It is a command I will certainly be using in the future, probably a lot, and I’m very glad someone was keen enough to actually make this a working command.

Overall, the two commands I spoke about seem to be extremely useful, especially bisect, and I will certainly hold onto them for future reference in Git. Heinz also mentions the “Worktree” command but, while this command also seems quite useful, I found the other two to be much cooler as well as understandable to use. It also opens my eyes to the fact that there are also many other git commands and features that could be utilized, and I’m definitely going to look into the rest of them as I am sure I will find a few more very useful commands.

Source: https://martinheinz.dev/blog/109?utm_source=tldrwebdev

From the blog CS@Worcester – RBradleyBlog by Ryan Bradley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week, I decided to find another Reddit post as the last Reddit post I covered I felt had a lot to take from it as it was a community of people giving their real thoughts and feelings on a certain aspect of Comp Sci. Today, I found a post on the importance of object-oriented design, and people discussing the different values it holds.

One of the top comments on the post is about how understanding object-oriented design is a great foundation for writing clean code, which is something we discuss in CS-348. It isn’t necessarily something you can just learn on the go while working, and, rather something you should try to learn about as much as you can while in school to then apply in the workplace. I’m very appreciative of reading this actually as I typically like to think most stuff gets easier to apply/learn as you’re working, but if a lot of people agree that you should understand as much as you can about object-oriented design BEFORE actually starting a job, then it’s certainly something I’m going to want to have down. The general consensus wasn’t that you won’t get better at applying these principles as you progress in your career but that you should have a strong foundation of knowledge on these principles going into your career as it is crucial to know certain aspects of it, like when one object ends and another begins or how to model object relations.

OOP is so important, many of the Redditors on this post also seem to agree that you’ll find it very hard to even get a job if you don’t at least have a base understanding of the concepts. It isn’t necessarily hard to understand a lot of these concepts as they’re pretty fundamental, but you should be able to answer questions either directly related, or somewhat related to OOP in job interviews as if the interviewer begins to think you may not know what you’re talking about, you may quickly lose your opportunity at that job. Some people did make comments explaining how it does depend on the concept of the job too such as the primary language you’ll be programming in or even the exact role of your job, but the general consensus still seems to be that you want to have at least a strong fundamental understanding of object-oriented design and the ability to apply it’s principles in your coding.

There are over 100 comments on this post that all make great points on why understanding these principles are very beneficial to you, even just a fundamental understanding of them can help you go a long way. It seemed to me that people had varying levels on how important overall understanding all of these principles are, but they all seemed to agree that knowing the basics of them and being able to apply them all to some degree in your coding, as well as being able to understand and talk about them (in interviews especially), is certainly the most important/beneficial thing you could do.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/z2fcyb/how_important_is_object_oriented_design/

From the blog CS@Worcester – RBradleyBlog by Ryan Bradley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Back again with another design pattern, and this time with one I have absolutely no idea about. I chose this particular video because I like this guy’s videos and I think he does an excellent job with explaining things in a way I can understand and I wanted to know some more design patterns. From another video by Christopher Okhravi I am learning about the Observer Pattern. Mr.Okhravi goes over this pattern with a lot of visuals which I very much appreciate and also goes into great depth with this pattern, but what does this pattern do? This pattern which involves utilizing one object that acts as the “Observable” and then this Observable object has a relationship with many “Observer” objects where if there is a change inside the Observable the Observable pushes out a change to all the Observer objects it’s connected to.

Looking at this pattern it’s kind of hard for me to wrap my head around an example of what it could be used for, but I did understand how the system itself would work, it just feels somewhat more complicated than I can really handle at this moment. Otherwise, though I did feel like I learned quite a bit about this pattern like how different languages have different variations and limits on what an observer pattern can do. Though the somewhat odd nature of the pattern does confuse me, even though it looks so simple. Like how it’s kind of cyclical where we are passing observer objects to the observable and then back again. This just really confused me but I think I’ll need to watch the video again to really grasp it fully. The example Okhravi uses of a “weather station” helped to really elucidate what I was confused about, where we have the physical components displaying the data and then the actual data that is being monitored by the weather station and watched by those observer components.

I think for the future I’m not really sure how often I’ll be using this pattern but I can foresee some use cases for it as it might be very useful when I need constant monitoring of something. But I think evidently even if I can’t come up with any ideas now I definitely think in the future I’ll be making use of this pattern and that I need to learn about even more patterns so that I can apply them where I need them, and to maybe go back and relearn those initial patterns I learned about.

Here’s the video:

From the blog CS@Worcester – aRomeoDev by aromeo4f978d012d4 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

As an expressly visual and hands-on learner, I try to find resources that have decent practical visuals and explanations. In class we already do this, and I’ve already had the chance to have some practice with Git and various remote repo websites like GitHub. But I wanted to have a more succinct and shorter summarization of Git and how to use it. This video was actually perfect for that as it essentially runs through what Git is, how it’s used and what it’s used for and then goes over some complicated problems that can show up eventually when using Git. I mostly chose this specific video because of what I’ve mentioned previously where I was looking for something a bit more visual for me to sink my teeth into that I can extract information from as using git is still somewhat complicated to me.

Watching through this video was actually pleasant as it had lots of very appealing and easy to understand visuals with a lot of examples of everything discussed or mentioned in it. I very much enjoyed the experience it provided but it was still a mostly basic, more foundational resource designed to give a nice outline of what git can do and that I can really appreciate as I’m still relatively new when it comes to something like this. But seeing how git is more flexible than I initially thought was nice to know as I didn’t really connect that it also works with other repo websites other than GitHub, as I’ve only really had to use it in that instance.

But seeing the different applications of git and the different issues that can arise with it I am imagining that it will most likely be a headache that I’ll have to contend with very often, especially when it comes to merging problems. Hopefully though this will not be the case and every project I work on will go perfectly. Evidently though I can foresee that git will actually just be something I have to interface with on a most likely daily basis where I’ll be pulling, committing, fetching, merging, and pushing all the time especially if there’s any collaboration to be had. So, it would only make sense for me to really practice and understand the depths and complexities of what git can do, so for the near future I’ll probably be looking for something to take me into those depths.

Here’s the video:

From the blog CS@Worcester – aRomeoDev by aromeo4f978d012d4 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Growing up, sometimes when I would Google search things, the page would not load and instead, it would give me a code, typically a 404. I never understood what it was or what it meant until recently. The 404 is a REST API response code, a code that the server returns when a web page or URL requests something. There are a bunch of codes, ranging from successful requests to malformed URLs to unstable connections to the servers. But there is more to them than just response codes.

In this blog post, the Postman Team talks about everything REST API related, including their history, how they work, their benefits, some challenges, and go over some examples. REST API uses resources, which can be a number of things, such as a document, an image, or multiples of them. REST is able to use an identifier to determine the type of resource being used in interactions. REST API uses methods, which is the type of request that is being sent to the server. These methods are GET, PUT, POST, DELETE, and PATCH. Each does something different from each other, allowing the user and the server to do a multitude of actions. GET does what the name suggests, it asks the server to find the data you asked for, and then it sends it back to you. DELETE deletes the specified data entry. PUT updates the specified entry, PATCH will do a similar thing. POST will add a new entry. With these methods, they return codes, describing what happened with the request. 200 is a successful response, 201 is a successful creation, etc. There are a number of codes, going from 100 to 599, each with a different response. REST API is flexible, allowing you to do more with them. REST API is used mainly for web use, but can also be used in cloud services and applications. The benefits of using REST API include scalability, flexibility and portability, independence, and lightweight. The challenges of it though are endpoint consensus, versioning, and authentication. The blog post goes into detail about all this in their post.

I chose this blog post because it did a good job of explaining everything about REST API. It even has a YouTube video listed in the post, which also explains what is in the blog post. APIs are used everywhere, so it is interesting to learn about something that is essentially a part of all computer related things. Although this is REST API related, there are a number of APIs, each with something different that they offer.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Cao's Thoughts by antcao and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.