After looking at the list of Apprenticeship Patterns, the one titled “Be the Worst” caught my attention. I was curious as to why you would want to be the worst. After all, conventional wisdom would suggest that one should try to be the best. However, after reading about the pattern, being the worst is a way to become better. The pattern explains that you should aim to constantly surround yourself by developers that are better than you. By doing so, you would give yourself room to grow. Being in a strong team gives you an opportunity to learn the effective techniques, tips, and methods that stronger developers use. The goal is not to constantly remain the worst, but rather, to work hard to climb your way up from the bottom and become equal to the other members.

However, there are a few risks with being the worst. One of these risks is feeling bad about yourself and your skills. Being the worst member of the team means you are not up to par with everybody else, and that could lead you to become even less productive. Another risk that you could run into is dragging the team down. Being the weakest member, some teams might not tolerate your weakness for long, especially if you do not put in the effort to constantly improve and hone your skills. If you fall too far behind, then you risk getting fired. The way to avoid these risks is to make yourself useful by doing explicitly doing menial tasks and by developing concrete skills to increase the amount of your contributions. Rapid growth is what these teams want to see, and it is likely why you were hired to join them.

I think Be the Worst is a useful pattern. It gives a clear idea or a method as to how developers can grow professionally and actively hone their skills. While there are risks involved in being the worst, it can be avoided with a strong drive to improve and be a contributing member. The potential benefits of this pattern are immense and it should be something that every apprentice developer should look into.

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

“It is better to be honest about your skills and fail to land a job, than it is to lie and put yourself in a situation that’s over your head.” – Someone, probably.

That quote, while partially meant as a joke, does have some truth behind it. Unfortunately, in this world of ever-increasing job requirements, it seems enticing to claim skills that you don’t actually have. This, however, can lead to an avalanche of constantly falling behind on work, and procrastinating/struggling to keep up with the rest of the team. Tapping into my previous entry (“Being the Worst”), we can see that is better to be honest about ignorance than to “shove it under the rug”, as one would say.

“Apprenticeship Patterns” essentially states that for this pattern, we must face a very difficult aspect of our lives – admitting that we are not the best at everything, and that we need to ask for help. Similar to “Being the Worst”, I find this philosophy to be familiar, but fascinating nonetheless. While it took me more time to confront my ignorance than to challenge my skills, I understand that both of these processes will make me a better programmer (and a better person) in the long run.

The most useful aspect of this pattern is the idea that, regardless of what we do with our lives (from scientific advancements like coding software to artistic talents such as playing guitar), it is more important to learn how to learn, than to “learn towards a goal”. To phrase this with better clarity – if we can understand the most effective way to learn, it will make our challenges much easier to overcome than trying to simply take on the challenge directly.

While I don’t think that this pattern has changed my thoughts about professional programming, I do believe that it has emphasized the importance of brainstorming, “thinking outside the box”, and other important factors of discovering unknown material. Most importantly, exposing ignorance shows that, as programmers, we know that we don’t have the solution that our client desires (yet), but we are also searching for it.

Maybe it’s because I’m no stranger to shame, but I must say that I disagree with the idea that there is “tremendous pressure to satisfy clients, regardless of one’s actual competence”. For me, the best way to satisfy clients (and pacify my own anxiety) is to select the most reasonable long-term solution – in this case, admitting my ignorance. “Dodging the bullet” during the sprint planning might provide short-term anxiety relief, but the problems avoided remain unchecked, building up far more anxiety in the long-term.

From the blog CS@Worcester – mpekim.code by Mike Morley (mpekim) and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

DESIGN PATTERNS.

Design patterns provide a comprehensive solution that can be reused for common problems that arise in software design. A design pattern isn’t a complete design that can be transformed directly into code.

Types of Design Patterns:

• Creational Design Patterns
  Creational Patterns deal with object creation mechanisms, trying to create objects in a manner suitable to the situation. They reduce complexity and instability by creating objects in a controlled manner.

Types of CDP:

1. Abstract Factory

Creates families of related dependent objects.

• Builder

Constructs complex objects using step-by-step approach.

• Factory Method

 Creates an instance of several derived classes.

• Prototype,

 Creates a new object from an existing object.

• Singleton,

A class of which only a single instance can exist.

• Structural Design Pattern

These design patterns are concerned with arranging different classes and objects to create larger structures and provide new functionality. Structural class-creation patterns use inheritance to create interactions/interfaces.

Types of SDP:

1. Adapter

Allows for two incompatible classes to work together by wrapping an interface around one of the existing classes.

• Bridge

Separates the outline so that the two classes can differ on their own.

• Composite

Composite patternconsider a group of objects to be one.

• Decorator
  Allows for an object’s behavior to be extended dynamically at run time.
• Facade

Provides a simple interface to a more complex underlying object.

• Flyweight

Flyweight pattern takes the weight, or memory footprint, off of our objects by recycling them.

• Proxy

This pattern offers a proxy, or a substitute, to another complex object. Provides a space interface for the primary object to control access, reduce costs, or reduce complexity.

• Behavioral Design Patterns

Behavioral patterns are about identifying common patterns of communication between objects and identifying these patterns.

Types of BDP:

1. Chain of Responsibility.

Delegates commands to a chain of processing objects.

• Command.

Creates objects which encapsulate actions and parameters.

• Interpreter.

Implements a specific language.

• Iterator.

It accesses the elements of an object in sequence without revealing its basic representation.

• Mediator.

Allows for free integration between classes as it is the only class that has in-depth knowledge of their methods.

• Memento.

Provides the ability to restore an object to its previous state.

• Observer.

 Is a publish/subscription pattern that allows a number of observer objects to see an event.

• State.

Allows an object to change its behavior when its internal state changes.

• Strategy.

Allows one of a family of algorithms to be selected on-the-fly at run-time.

1. Template Method.

Defines the framework of the algorithm as an abstract class, allowing its sub-classes to deliver consistent behavior.

1. Visitor.

Separates an algorithm from an object structure by moving the hierarchy of methods to a single object.

REFERENCE

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/design-patterns-set-1-introduction/
2. https://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns

From the blog CS@Worcester – THE SOLID by isaacstephencs and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

What is YAGNI?

YAGNI – You aren’t gonna need it is an Extreme Programming (XP) key practice that’s states: “Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them.”As it stated then programmer should not add functionality until it is proven to be absolutely necessary

YAGNI Principle always recommends programmers to build the easiest solution to today’s problems. Even if you are sure you will need the feature, moreover, do not run it now. Mostly, it’ll alter in either:

1. You won’t need it after all, or
2. What you really need is different from what you originally thought.

Why YAGNI Principle is mostly relevant in Software Development Lifecycle than others?

In Software Development when software developers start implementing features they always go into practices known as FEATURE CREEP. Software developers always try to add or improve features regardless of whether they are not requested by users. For example, developers may try to add authentication to the form without first completing CRUD in the database.

Alternatively, following YAGNI in the configuration life cycle enables developers to implement features that will only be relevant for the first duplicate or demo and other future features that will work as a new version or update of software developed as recommended by users.

YAGNI Principle is safe, if …

The YAGNI principle, alone, may not be secure. Software developers can set up an early algorithm on the system and then copy-paste it all over, so when it goes wrong they spend a lot of effort fixing it. With this process in coding, YAGNI is very dangerous and may not be the best idea.

But when the developers set the quality of the design, the quality of the code, and the quality of the test, YAGNI is completely safe, as every future risk is excluded by simple design rules, and it will be easy to find and fix if it goes wrong.

Benefits of YAGNI:

• With a simple answer you can say the biggest benefit of the YAGNI Principle is to avoid unnecessary development.

Main reasons to practice YAGNI

1. It saves time as you avoid writing code that may not make sense later.

2. Your current code is better because you avoid guessing which can be bad

For two main reasons for practice, they ensure:

• That deadlines are available quickly,

• Customer satisfaction due to visible and frequent changes according to their needs or details,

• The best quality of code ordered by the fact that developers focus on small tasks (those that are currently very important),

• The code can be extended more and more (allows for updated versions),

• Reduced number of adjustments required,

• That the error is easy to fix.

REFERENCE: – 

https://deviq.com/principles/yagni

From the blog CS@Worcester – THE SOLID by isaacstephencs and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

API, absolutely not the IPA’s beers (unless there really is the API beer) that Petr Gazarov, a software developer with more than 3600 followers on medium, mentioned in his blog, is an acronym of Application Programming Interface. Hmm, you might have heard about it but what it really is?

When we type the URL, for example, facebook.com, we send the request to Facebook’s remote server, which is a remotely located computer, and that computer, which is a server, processes the request through an API to display the webpage. From that instance, Gazarov defined that “An API isn’t the same as the remote server–rather it is the part of the server that receives, requires and sends responses.”

One example is the Object–Oriented Design, code is organized into objects, which will later be used to interact with one another. From my own experience, the first time I was aware of using the API was in the Data Structure class, the Oracle API provides specifications for the JVM Platform, Standard Edition, and the instructions on how to use those methods are documented. I was working with Stack in Java and I want to look at the object at the top of this stack without removing it, I will use peek() instead of pop() as instructed from the API documentation to request relevant operations. The Stack is the object designed by Oracle and the peek() function is a public method in that object, and a set of public methods and properties is an API. Web Server API is similar, the idea is to receive requests and responses.

The difference is the format of the request and response, in my case, it was simply just a function with a small operation, in other cases, different APIs provide flexible responses with tons of uses. One thing I learned from his blog is that to render the whole web page, the browser expects a response in HTML containing presentational code, Google Calendar’s API call would return the JSON formatted data.

Another experience that I’ve got when I was working with my friend in a web project is creating the backend of this project, which is developing the GET, POST, PUT, DELETE functions to respond to his request for his frontend application. The role of this API is to return the data, formatted in JSON, which is stored in Firebase database to the person working in the frontend in order to design the graphical user interface.

In short, Gazarov concluded” any piece of software that can be distinctly separated from its environment, can be an “A” in API, and will probably also have some sort of API”. Since this blog consolidates my understanding about API, I hope you will also find it useful.

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

Solid principles are divided into five different parts of programming and a design that addresses objects. Robert Cecil Martin or also known as “Uncle Bob”, was the one who introduced this type of anchoring or principle also called SOLID. This is one of the principles, where each letter represents a method which is represented by three letters, and which basically has a principle. When we work with software, which has a poorly managed management mode, we are dealing with a code that can become rigid, a fragile mode, and this makes this software difficult to use. When the code is rigid we are dealing with a code that is difficult to modify, it is difficult to change the way it currently works, or even more difficult to add any other features.

·  Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)

·  Open-Closed Principle (OCP)

·  Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP)

·  Interface Segregation Principle (ISP)

·  Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)

Single Responsibility Prinnciple

The Principle of Sole Responsibility (SRP) at its core for a class not to change, there should be no more than one reason. And this results in every different class having to work with one method. However, each member in the class is related has a direct connection to what is called the primary function of the class. Unlike the example where a class has multiple responsibilities within it, in this method the possibility that it needs to be changed increases even more. And from all of this, we have an increased risk of presenting flaws whenever a class starts to modify. But by focusing only on one responsibility, this risk is even more limited.

Open-Closed Principle (OCP)

The Open / Closed Principle (OCP) means that classes for extension should generally be open, but for modification they should be closed. “Open for extension” aims to open the creation of our classrooms in order to add new functionality, while new requirements are generated. “Closed for modification” means not modifying a class after we have developed it, as it should never be modified, except to correct defects. These two parts of the principle seem to be contradictory to each other. However, if we structure our classes and their dependencies well, we can add functionality without having to reduce the existing source code.

Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP)

The Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) can be formed in a variety of ways. LSP is applicable to inheritance hierarchies. He emphasizes that we need to create as many of our classes as possible, so that client dependencies are replaced with subclasses without the client being aware of this change. For this reason, all subclasses are based on functioning in the same way as the basic classes they have. Subclasses do not have to apply only the methods and properties that the class bases have so that they are the true type of behavior. But they must also be consistent with her behavior. And this requires compliance with some basic rules.

Interface Segregation Principle (ISP)

There are some classes that have public interfaces and that are not cohesive. The principle of interface sharing (ISP) explains that clients are not tasked with dependent on interfaces that are not usable by them.

– The first rule is the existence of contradictions between the parameters of the methods that the base class has and that of the compliance in the subclasses.

– The other rule is for preconditions and unconditional. The other LSP considers invariant.

-The other rule is to limit history.

– The last rule of LSP states that a subclass should not throw exceptions that are not thrown from the other base class.

Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)

(DIP) indicates that high-level modules should not be dependent on low-level modules. Both should be dependent on abstraction. These abstractions should not depend on the details, but these should depend on the abstractions. The idea is that high and low-level modules have, categorizes classes hierarchically. High-level classes or modules are those that deal with much larger groups of their functionality.

References

https://www.jrebel.com/blog/solid-principles-in-java

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/solid-principle-in-programming-understand-with-real-life-examples/

https://www.educative.io/edpresso/what-are-the-solid-principles-in-java

From the blog CS@worcester – Xhulja's Blogs by xmurati and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I chose this article because it explains in detail the components of docker and how they each are applied in different phases of software development. I believe this will help unfamiliar students learn more about the components of docker beyond that of a general understanding. Given that we are already using docker in this course, I imagine we will be using it for future projects as well. A deeper understanding of this platform would be highly beneficial.

The docker service is made up of several components. A container is like a stripped-down virtual machine where programs can be run in isolation. A Docker image is what defines what will make up a container and contains the directions for how and what will run. For example, a MySQL Docker image would contain the instructions for running an instance of MySQL server and exposing the necessary ports. What runs the docker image is called the Docker Engine and is responsible for virtualizing the container on the host machine. The last major component is docker-compose, which allows one to configure storage, network, and interaction between Docker image containers. The purpose of docker is to allow pre-configured containers to run exactly the same wherever docker is installed. Because all containers are identical to the image they are created on, multiple containers can be run to quickly scale to meet performance demands.

I have used docker in the past on multiple occasions, the last being for my database design final project building a full-stack web application. To see how docker is used in a full-stack application, you can review the source code here gitlab.com/mjared94/todo-app inside the server directory. In the app, we used docker to streamline team development and simplify the backend services in use. The application required a database and a way to manage the database during development. Rather than installing the software individually on each of our computers, we used docker to quickly launch the services identically on each machine. This can be done using docker-compose, which allows you to outline how you want your containers to interact with each other as mentioned above.

Our web server was run directly from the terminal relying on the docker services. In production, we could have also containerized our web server to run in conjunction with the other containers. Doing so would have enabled anyone with docker to run our todo application, along with the required backend services, without any prior configuration. Containerizing our application would also make deployment seamless because our pre-configured container could be launched on virtually any web host. After reading this article and understanding the docker components in more detail, I will be better able to use them in the future. 

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Blog resource link: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3204171/what-is-docker-the-spark-for-the-container-revolution.html

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.

Believe it or not, I have been coding since the year 2015. As the title implies, the first university that I attended (right out of high school) was the University of Massachusetts – Lowell. Interestingly enough, within my very first textbook at UML, I would be exposed to another kind of “UML” – Unified Modeling Language. At this time, Unified Modeling Language was little more than a reference at the back of the book; there was more written on the subject, but my mind was concentrating on concepts such as how to “calloc()” in C.

Fast forward 5 years, and now Unified Modeling Language takes on a larger role; it is being used for visual representations of classes and inheritance in Java code. This can be seen with the following YouTube video, “How To Make Easy UML Sequence Diagrams and Flow Charts with PlantUML” by user “Be A Better Dev”. Essentially, the video shows how Java code can be written and then turned into a UML chart for a visual representation of classes and their features.

Personally, I selected this particular video due to the fact that I enjoy using YouTube more than any other social media; this way, I can use the app for educational purposes as well as recreational ones. This nine minute video is a great way to learn about how to code for UML in a format that is digestible on a busy schedule (when at work, for example). In addition, I expect the material to be applicable to aspects of the course (such as homework and exams) due to it being another form of practice. Practice, practice and yet more practice is the most important way to retain any type of coding/programming knowledge, and UML is no different.

It’s crazy to think that something barely glossed over from my educational journey five years ago would be so prevalent in the present day. However, it makes sense; programming practices such as using an arrow (->) operator or parentheses for a method are given new meanings when working with UML. Extending this further, programming syntax can create additional effects within the PlantUML environment. For example, placing an arrow on one side or another of an entity will effect exactly where it extends from on said entity.

As a final note, I am glad that I am able to work with this newfound technology. Ever since my days at UML, I have been wondering about when my code would leave the IDE environment and tackle more “lively” features (such as a graphical interface). Thanks to Unified Modeling Language, I now have a method of making my code come to life.

Article Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xObBUVDMbQs

From the blog CS@Worcester – mpekim.code by Mike Morley (mpekim) and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The article I’ve decided to read for this blog entry is titled, “Getting Started – An overview of Markdown, how it works, and what you can do with it.” The reason I picked this article is because it is connected to our first homework assignment. Our first homework assignment has us working with UML class diagrams and when I clicked on the web IDE on GitLab, I was brought to a file that was written in Markdown language where I would have to add my Java code and create PlantUML class diagrams. I’m not too familiar with Markdown language and since I would be interacting with it for my first homework assignment, I figured I’d do some research to learn more about it. 

The article I read starts out by defining Markdown language, “Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents.” The article then goes into explaining why people use Markdown. I’ve learned that Markdown can be used for essentially anything: from websites, documents, notes, books, presentations, email messages, to technical documentation. I also learned that Markdown is platform independent and that the content that is created on it doesn’t get locked into a proprietary file format like Microsoft Word. 

Next, the article discusses how Markdown works. This process can be generalized into four steps:

1. Create a Markdown file.

2. Open the file in an Markdown application.

3. Use the Markdown application to convert the file to an HTML document.

4. Render the HTML document to a web browser (or another document).

During this part of the article, we also learn more about Dillinger, a Markdown editor that combines these steps. It was useful for me to learn the name of this editor because if I were to ever use Markdown for myself, I now know a common and popular editor to do so.

Lastly, the article’s main ending point is that there are many different “flavors of Markdown” and that using Markdown with one editor may provide a very different experience than using Markdown with a different editor. Many of the basic syntax may be the same but there are extended syntax elements that likely differ.

One of the biggest takeaways for me is that after I finished reading this article, I looked into other kinds of markup languages and learned how they are different from programming languages and scripting languages. Unlike programming and scripting languages, markup languages are presentation languages that do not do logical operations. It’s safe to say that, now that I’ve learned about Markdown, I feel more confident moving forward with my homework assignment (even if what I learned was going to be only a minor piece of my overall assignment).

Article: https://www.markdownguide.org/getting-started/

From the blog Sensinci's Blog by Sensinci's Blog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.