https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/types-of-UML-diagrams

https://c4model.com/

For this week we’ll be covering modeling which is an important aspect in not only software design, but also design in general. Modeling is a very simple concept; it is when one creates a visual representation of a project, program, or whatever someone is working on. It is a visual tool used to streamline and simplify the process of development. In software design, there are two specific types of models which are called UML and C4 diagrams. UML, which stands for Unified Modeling Language, is used to give a visual representation to the architecture, design, and implementation of a software system. For example, a software system by a group of interconnected boxes which symbolize each class in that system. A class is represented in UML as a box which is separated into three sections which hold the name of the class, its attributes, and its operations. C4 meanwhile is used to give a visual representation to the architecture at different levels of detail. For example, a software system is represented by an interconnected group of boxes symbolizing each element of that system. As one zooms closer, each element breaks down into smaller parts that make up of that component. This process spans four levels from the system context level, to the container level, to the component, to the code or UML level. The key difference between C4 and UML diagrams is that C4 uses the general framework of UML to visualize a software system at greater scales.

The general importance of these models is that before creating software, you have to form a plan. If one were to skip this step, they would likely run into multiple problems like forgetting to implement a part of the software, making a mistake that isn’t noticed until much later, or having no clear direction in development. Often times when these mistakes are made, developers would have to devote time to correct them when they could have created a model allowing them to develop more of the software in a shorter amount of time. Models can also be useful with how they can make peer review easier. If a developer wants a peer’s feedback on the general structure of their work, they can give them an easy to understand model rather than the code for the classes that make up an entire software system. Models are a very simple but also very important aspect to software development which is also the main reason why I chose to write about this topic.

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

The pattern “The White Belt” is all about becoming a student once again and not letting your knowledge or expertise in a certain subject get in the way of learning new things. The pattern also talks about how you should put aside past experience and unlearn things so that you can understand what you were struggling to learn. The pattern also wants you to use a new language or style to solve a problem so that you don’t fall into the same hole that you have been when it comes to learning. I often find myself in a similar problem when it comes to programming because I often use similar code in future projects or rely heavily on what I know works versus trying new things that may work better. This pattern is similar to other patterns but focuses on relearning or learning new things and setting aside past experience. I felt that this pattern is important to remember for my professional career cause I could see myself facing a similar problem to the one described in the pattern.
I think that an extremely important part of the pattern is that you should try to learn from other people. This part of the pattern is discussed and is the key focus of the pattern “Be the Worst”. I do not like the fact that they continue to blend patterns together since it makes it harder to distinguish between the different patterns. I think focusing on learning new things without allowing old knowledge to corrupt the new knowledge is an important part of learning anything and especially coding. With the way people can easily connect on common interests and topics on platforms like Discord, Twitter, FaceBook, and more, I can see myself joining different coding communities and interacting with other people that may have more knowledge on a topic than me, in order to learn more in different areas of coding. This pattern has given me a new way to avoid getting stuck in a rut that is common in the computer science field. Using different languages is important to better understand the inner works of what a function does and how it can be implemented in different ways.

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

All the big CEO’s and entrepreneurs will give you trite advice on their LinkedIn pages: you need to fail a lot in order to succeed a lot.

I can’t be too hard on anyone who wants to get this message out, because I had to hear it at some point too. Failure meant incompetence to me, not part of the path to success. But what if failures don’t stop? The “Learn How You Fail” apprenticeship pattern attempts to solve the problem of lingering failures despite increased success.

This is likely due to something you are repeatedly doing that causes the failures. Hone in on these behaviors, because changing them is the only way to stop failing. Furthermore, you may simply not be good at some things, and finding these things can prevent wasted time and effort.

A potential problem with this pattern is that a lot of failure is likely due to blind spots in our perception of ourselves, so it’s likely not easy to solve the problem of uncovering the cause of our failures. But as software developers, our skills in pattern recognition should be top notch. Carefully documenting your failures and how they connect should reveal the patterns.

A coworker asked me years ago what my chosen superpower would be. I answered that I would want to know everything. Omniscience. Besides briefly earning me the nickname “know-it-all”, this reflects my own desire to fix my unfixable flaws. Now, I do think significant effort should be put into things that you are especially bad at. But this pattern is a good reminder to let go of the things that you’ve tried to do and simply haven’t worked out.

Success is many cases is figuring out what you are good at, not about fixing all of your weaknesses. This is the reasons the US President has a cabinet, Congress has subcommittees, companies have divisions, and software team members have roles. We can’t all do everything.

My biggest issue with this pattern going forward will be striking a balance. There will always be a desire to learn as much as possible. Gaining more skill and broadening horizons may be tempting, but knowing when to give up in a specific area is the challenge. The CEOs who credit their success to past failures knew what to give up on within their chosen field. Almost always, this doesn’t mean choosing a brand new career; it means finding what you’re doing wrong in the current one.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Inquiries and Queries by James Young and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Reading consistently give you ability to happen our mind.

And when reading connately about good programming, it will build you knowledge and would open more understanding of programming.

“If you read even one good programming book every two months, roughly 35 pages a week, you’ll soon have a firm grasp on the industry and distinguish yourself from nearly everyone around you.”

Books are the key component for growing. Not even book, just the articles or some options on a certain programing tasks you are doing. 

I like how this section cover the need of reading the words. looking at the word and understanding it. We as a software developer should not only be doing readings on the language tat we are familiar with but also on other languages that is some how connected it the pervious one.

The similarity will connect the broad perfection of a different but yet similar languor. For example,  HTML and CSS are quite similar, java and javascript function and calls are similar but are implemented differently. 

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tech a Talk -Arisha Khan by ajahan22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For my final project in my Software construction, design, and architecture class, my partner and I had the idea of creating a web page that was able to access data of a SQLite database. The structure of this project was to connect to a database using Java as a backend and use Rest api to send out sql commands. We needed to run the backend on a server using a Spring Boot framework available to us. Once our connection was setup and our backend methods to access the database was ready we had to create the front end. We used Typescript and Java Angular to create our front end, or in other words our web page. The typescript code had to connect to the Java rest api so our chain of connections from the top goes; Typescript and Angular -> Java Rest api -> SQLite database. 

Starting the project the very first obstacle we ran into was connection Java rest api to the SQLite database. It was something we had never done before, but thankfully there was helpful resources online. We found out that there was a series of Java imports to facilitate this function. A few imports needed are as follows:

import java.sql.*;

import java.sql.Connection;

import java.sql.DriverManager;

import java.sql.ResultSet;

import java.sql.SQLException;

import java.sql.Statement;

Using these imports we were able to create an object of type ‘Connection’ in order to establish the actual connection to the database. Here is our method:

public static Connection getConnection() {

   if (conn == null) {

       try {

           conn = DriverManager.getConnection(“jdbc:sqlite:” + dbpath);

       } catch (SQLException e) {

           e.printStackTrace();

       }

   }

   return conn;

}

The set method to set our path:

DatabaseSQL.setPath(“C:/…(insert path here)…”);

We are now able to get the connection inside our Java rest api classes that contain our SQLite query methods using this statement:

Connection conn = DatabaseSQL.getConnection();

As I said this information can be found through many sources online so we were lucky such a function was available for us to use at our disposal. We needed the connection to be established before we could proceed with anything else because the entire project relied on accessing the database. However, in order to actually know if our connection was working we couldn’t rely on the absence of errors. We needed to create a rest api method to access the database and give us a result so that we could be sure.

From the blog cs@worcester – Zac's Blog by zloureiro and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.