The context given here is that as a result of your dedication to learning, you have been hired or promoted (formally or informally) into a position with a title containing words such as “senior,” “architect,” or “lead”. The problem is then that your job title doesn’t match what you see in the mirror. When you introduce yourself in a professional setting, you feel as if you have to apologize or explain away the difference between your skill level and your job description. The solution suggested is not to allow your title to affect you. It is a distraction that should be kept on the outskirts of your consciousness. Use your title to gauge your organization, not yourself.

Impressive titles and responsibilities do not indicate that your apprenticeship is over. They only serve to remind you that there is a shortage of craftsmen in our industry so we should not be fooled by an impressive title. Another variant of this theme is informal versus formal titles. For instance, you may have grown into a position of authority on your team, despite your formal title remaining the same. These informal titles can be hard to ignore, because they are constantly reinforced by your peers, even if they conflict with your self-assessment. During these times, your connections with your mentors and peers will be critical to keep you grounded in reality.

I was really glad to see that the title subject was tackled in this book. So many times, I have found myself in jobs doing way more than what my title said sometimes even doing something completely different. In my current position, I am doing my job and some part of the data analyst job and at first, I got slightly annoyed but I have now realized that I would try to learn from it as much as possible rather than complain about it

I also really liked their action plan which is to Write down a long and descriptive version of your job title. Make sure it accurately reflects what you really do at work and your skill level. Keep this updated, and from time to time imagine how you would view a stranger who had this job description.

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

This pattern encourages us to go beyond the surface level work. The context given is that You live in a world of tight deadlines and complex software projects that use a multitude of tools. Your employers cannot afford the luxury of employing enough specialists to fill every role. You learn only enough about any tool to get today’s job done. You select a handful of tutorials on the language or library that you’re working with today and consequently You make decisions without taking the time to understand the issues, and copy the toy examples provided with the tools. The problem is then that You keep running into difficulty maintaining the code you’ve written because it turns out that the tutorials you followed cut corners and simplified complex issues. You find that your superficial knowledge of a thousand tools means you’re always floundering whenever a subtle bug arises or you have to do something that demands deep knowledge.

The solution suggested is now to Learn to dig deep into tools, technologies, and techniques. Acquire the depths of knowledge to the point that you know why things are the way they are. Depth means understanding the forces that led to a design rather than just the details of a design. In other words, it also means understanding type theory rather than simply parroting the things you’ve heard others say. I agree with what is being said because the areas where you have deep knowledge feed your confidence and they indicate places where you can deliver value early in your time with a new team. More importantly, this depth of knowledge is something you can fall back on to give you the strength to tackle new areas.  I have mentioned before how I usually run straight to google or StackOverflow in time of doubts but 95% if the time the website only provides “quick fix” type of answers and there is no real learning happening. I have understood that applying this pattern regularly, will help me truly understand how my tools work and I will no longer just be gluing bits of code together and depending on other people’s magic to do the heavy lifting.

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

Christian Shadis

In the apprenticeship pattern Nurture Your Passion, Hoover and Oshineye explore the importance maintaining an interest, curiosity, and passion for computer science despite hostile conditions. They discuss the ways hostile work environments, boring projects, and cynical coworkers can bring down the morale of programmers, especially those in a developer position rather than an engineer position. They discuss the ways in which the developer can resist these negative external conditions to maintain their passion for the subject and continue growing as a developer.

This pattern coincides well with the Breakable Toys pattern, which discusses using interesting personal projects to supplement your development skills to avoid stagnation. Using this pattern would be an excellent way to Nurture Your Passion. Working on fun and interesting projects is an intuitive way to gain appreciation for a skill and spending the extra time working and learning on your own is an excellent way to supplement your knowledge in the subject; a win-win!

The pattern makes a lot of sense – in my non-CS jobs, I often felt uninspired and bored. While the work was not as engaging or creative as development, I was completely devoid of passion for my work. This made the day drag, led to resentment for the company, and caused an overall poor experience working. Working in a field that I am far more interested in will give me the opportunity to have passion for my work, but I must try my best to ensure it does not fizzle out due to stagnation. If I lose passion for coding, my development job will become as unfulfilling as my previous jobs.

I hope to use this pattern throughout my career, but especially so over this coming summer. I am likely most qualified to be a software developer, which is not as exciting a job as an engineer but using this pattern will ensure that my passion for development does not disappear before achieving a more desirable position. Specifically, I plan to rebuild my website in a full-stack capacity to fill in web-dev knowledge gaps, but also just to have fun working on a type of project I have not before.

Reference:

Hoover, D. H., & Oshineye, A. (2010). Perpetual Learning. In Apprenticeship patterns: Guidance for the aspiring software craftsman. O’Reilly.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Christian Shadis' Blog by ctshadis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Traditional web applications function by having single pages that need to be refreshed when data has to be updated or submitted. You can likely recall using a website where each time a form was submitted or a link was clicked, you had to wait for the data to process and a few seconds later a new page appears. This process feels very cumbersome and discourages the use of the service.

Modern-day web applications are single-page, meaning data is dynamically added and removed from the HTML without the page needing to be redownloaded. To do this, a virtual dom is created through javascript and rendered as HTML to the page. When the virtual dom has a change, the actual dom is updated only in the area that is needed, without reloading everything. This change in design improves speed, reduces the amount of data to load, and improves user experience. Most services used online today are single-page applications and when they are not, it feels old and outdated.

There are three main web frameworks that are used to create single-page applications and these are React.js, Angular, and Vue.js. Of these frameworks, Vue has the fastest-growing developer userbase. A main benefit of Vue is that it is an easy-to-learn framework. In Vue, the virtual dom has a two-way data binding. To dynamically control the webpage, Vue uses user-created components that are linked together in a hierarchy. Each component is abstracted and allowed to have variables passed to it to make it display specific data. This feature allows custom HTML components to be reused, reducing repeated code and unmanageably long HTML files. A benefit to Vue components is that they can be easily unit tested, as only a small portion of the web application will be tested at a time.

In each component, it can contain state variables, which are like javascript variables that are tied to an element on the webpage. When a state variable is changed, its value is updated on the webpage. The process of watching a variable for a state change and updating the virtual dom then rendering the update to the webpage is called data-binding. This process happens nearly instantaneously and is what makes using Vue-built applications feel seamless and snappy.

I have used React.js in the past and I am familiar with the structure of combining html and javascript together. I am interested in learning more about Vue and what benefits this framework has to offer. Vue separates out the style, structure, and logic of each component which forces developers to keep their code cleaner than in React.

Source: https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/engineering/pros-and-cons-of-vue-js

From the blog CS@Worcester – Jared's Development Blog by Jared Moore and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Before constructing a project, we must picture out an image out or possibly draw it out to get a better grasp. This way tends to make a smother software as writing our code. But overtime we must face challenges along the way, which regards to maintaining software and keeping it maintained and readable. I have found this website which is called https://flylib.com/books/en/4.444.1.47/1/. This website is a library is all types of information regarding a library of books in different areas such as SQL, programming languages, interfaces, etc. I believe this website can aid me and any other developer to get a wider insight on the information they desire to seek. 

Design smells are basically violations regarding poor designing and that can be spread among other parts of one’s code and/or project. Which is why we have types of code smells to determine on how to seek and resolve it before it becomes an issue. The design smells are divided into seven principals.

Rigidity design is where you make a small change in your code could make huge, unexpected changes in other areas of the software. Fragility design is almost like rigidity, but this is where is when you alter a change in your code and broken code starts to erupt in. this is a sneaky design smell because we do not realize it sometimes and it can potentially make it through the production phase. Immobility design is common due to the fact of parts that are deemed useful are also harder to separate as it can pose a risk. Viscosity designs are also common when deciding between a not good choice that is convenient other than a good one that is not convenient. Needless design comes in two forms which are needless complexity and needless repetition. Needless complexity is straight forward of making your code overly complicated than it needs to be that consists of redundancy. Needless repetition is composed of unnecessary repetition. For example, when we make copies of classes to do the same thing and adding more classes on top which result in a developer’s laziness. Lastly, we have opacity design where readability becomes harder to read and takes time to understand the code which waste time on a developer. 

After gathering information on design smells and seen examples of each type of design smell in my CS-343 class. I understand that it is crucial to refactor code where it can stay readable and keeping it maintained. When starting a project, we always want to make a visual image to make it easier to implement. Also applying the rules and avoiding design smell as much as we can but sometimes, we can miss them and are able to determine the type of smell and find a solution. 

From the blog cs@worcester – Dahwal Dev by Dahwal Charles and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Throughout this semester, the most interesting topics to me are those relating to how to produce good code. While I like learning about and implementing API requests in either the frontend or backend, regulating code utilizing something like the SOLID principles is interesting to me because it can be applied in many different situations and programming languages. We discussed the SOLID principles earlier in the semester, and while I walked to discuss them on this blog, I never got a chance to.

The Single Responsibility Principle states that a class should only have one job. The below article uses the example of shapes, namely a square and a circle. The Square class has the length of a square, and the Circle class has the radius of a circle. Another class, AreaCalculator, contains the logic that deals solely with adding the area of the different shape objects.

The Open-Closed Principle states that “Objects or entities should be open for extension but closed for modification”. If a programmer would like to take an existing class and add functionality to it, the existing class should be developed in such a way as to allow easy inheritance, and the programmer should add his implementation in an inherited class. In the article’s example, the author adds an area() function in the shape classes to calculate each shape’s respective area, then changes the design to implement a shape interface, which is implemented by the shape classes. The AreaCalculator then checks the instances of Shape Interface, and calculates that way.

The Liskov Substitution Principle states that every child class should be substitutable for their parent class. This means that a child class acts in the same way as its parent class, in this case, providing similar functionality and returning in a similar format. The article uses the example of a class called VolumeCalculator, that inherits from AreaCalculator. Both VolumeCalculator and AreaCalculator must be consistent, such that its implementation is the same.

The Interface Segregation Principle states that a client should never be forced to implement an interface that it doesn’t use, or depend on methods they don’t use. Building on the author’s example, if we needed to calculate the volume of a sphere, a class shouldn’t manage both a circle and a sphere, but segregate them into two different classes.

The Dependency Inversion Principle states that “entities must depend on abstractions, not on concretions”. In the author’s example, one class connects to the database, whereas another class depends on the connection class, thus they cannot decouple. Instead, we should implement a class using an interface, which is the parent class of the connection class. Abstraction is now applicable in both high-level and low-level classes.

Going through this article has been informative. I would also like to practice implementation and classes in Java or C++ to gain a better understanding of these principles.

Link:

1. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/conceptual_articles/s-o-l-i-d-the-first-five-principles-of-object-oriented-design

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

Hello Everyone! Hope all of you are doing well and Goodluck with your finals as we are in the last week of the semester. Today in this blog I want to talk about technical debt, it may sound like a financial term, but in the case of software development, technical debt is the idea that certain necessary work gets during the development of a software project in order to hit a deliverable or deadline. Technical debt (also known as tech debt or code debt) describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. In other words, it’s the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code. It is basically the extra coding work that a software development company has to do because they took a shortcut route to finish and deliver the product in time without making sure if it works properly or not.

Is technical debt bad? The simple answer is it’s neither good nor bad, it’s debt. Several software companies today are under pressure from the market and competitive forces to develop and ship fast. Startups especially feel this “ship or sink” pressure. This need for speed leads many product and software development teams to make the tradeoff between taking on technical debt or launching later. There is sometimes unintentional technical debt with various software development teams such as the team who follows Poor practices, this leads the works done during the project to be messy which then makes the teamwork on it later which lead to technical debt, Software development teams being Inexperience with new coding techniques leads to the delay of the coding process or in some cases making the code messy which than later lead to technical debt. For example, a design approach that ends up containing many errors is unintentional technical debt. This sometimes occurs as the direct result of poor communication with the organization or misalignment between the developers and operations teams.

I choose this article because this article gives a very easy definition of technical debt and it also contains a video that explains technical debt in detail, this article also talks about what are the good reasons for technical debt and the bad reason for technical debt which makes the concept clearer. And having a major in Software development, it is important to know about the concept of technical debt as it will help in the future as a software developer.

Article: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/technical-debt-explained-the-complete-guide-to-understanding-and-dealing-with-technical-debt/#

From the blog CS@Worcester – Mausam Mishra's Blog by mousammishra21 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.