CS 373 Spring 2021: Week 8

What did you do this past week?

I’ve mainly been working on the software engineering project with my group, in addition to assignments from other classes. We were able to get our website set up, and we’re focusing on writing tests for the most part now.

What’s in your way?

Not much at the moment. I feel well-rested after the break, and I’ve been able to keep on top of my coursework and other responsibilities.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I hope to get started on Phase 3, so I’ll meet with my group to discuss what we need to do.

If you read it, what did you think of the Interface Segregation Principle?

It reinforces something that I already kept in mind — modules should only use as much as they need to. Any more, and you introduce the possibility of additional reasons for change, as noted by the Single Responsibility Principle. Overall, it seems like a straightforward concept. The idea that interfaces should have separate groups of functionality seems like good design in that it lends itself to modular code, which is something to always strive for.

What was your experience of comprehensions, yield, closures, and decorators?

Comprehensions are a very simple, Pythonic way of constructing new iterables, and I use them all the time. I hadn’t used yields before, but in case you ever need to create your own generator, it seems like an easy way to accomplish that. Closures I found to be really interesting in how it allows you to access values from an outer scope, even after a function finishes running. I can see many cases where this may be useful, aside from decorators. And decorators themselves are a great tool to have, allowing one to wrap additional functionality for an object/function without having to rewrite anything at all.

What made you happy this week?

I was able to meet up with some friends over the break!

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Take frequent breaks from the computer, even if it’s just to get up for a glass of water or to look out your window for a minute. I find it helps refresh your thoughts, minimize eye strain, etc.