CS373 Software Engineering Blog#8

1. What did you do this past week?

This past week, my group and I met to discuss what needs to be done for phase 2. Since there is quite a bit of work for this next phase, we divided the work so that one person would be on frontend and four people would be on backend. We set up our database and started scraping the API’s to populate the database. We also started making our API endpoints and testing it with the frontend.

2. What’s in your way?

I specifically chose the backend team since I don’t have a ton of experience with databases and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to get some exposure. I think learning about SQLAlchemy and how to query from a table or scrape an API will require some research. I watched a few videos and read some articles, but it’s obviously going to take a bit longer to complete my portion since I still need to get some practice in.

3. What will you do next week?

Hopefully by next week most of the models in the database will be complete, so we can start testing with actual data and integrate it with the frontend. Next week, we’ll also starting writing some unit tests and get our CI tab set up in gitlab.

4. If you read it, what did you think of the Liskov Substitution Principle?

I had not heard of this principle before reading the paper, so it was pretty interesting and eye opening. It was slightly hard to follow at times, but seeing that it was an extension of the Open-Closed Principle, I was able to relate some of the concepts to what we learned before.

5. What was your experience of iteration, comprehensions, generators, and digits iterator?

I had a pretty good experience with these topics. I was familiar with iteration and comprehensions before the lecture, but generators was a new concept for me. It took a bit to grasp the purpose of it, but after Professor Downing went over it a few times, it seems like a very useful tool.

6. What made you happy this week?

I’m really looking forward to break and getting ahead in some of my classes. I have a test right after break so I’m thankful to get this chunk of time to relax and study incrementally.

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

Since we’re using MySQL as out database, we came across MySQL Workbench. It’s a visual database design tool that helps you visualize your database and test out values to see if the tables are behaving as they should. Since you can’t really console.log when debugging the backend, this tool is really helpful when catching bugs.