CS373 Fall 2021 Week 9: Darshan Bhatta

What did you do this past week?

This week I worked more on phase 2, focusing on setting up the backend unit tests and connecting our API to the frontend. It was fun connecting the backend to the frontend and seeing it work. I also got a chance to modify some of our backend API routes so that it was fully compatible with what the frontend was expecting. It was interesting working with flask since I hadn’t worked on it before but it was fairly easy to pick up.

What’s in your way?

Nothing is in my way at the moment.

What will you do next week?

Next week, my group and I will be doing any last-minute updates and submitting phase 2 on Monday. After that, I think next week will be pretty light since we will be getting introduced to phase 3 and planning out what work needs to be done for it.

If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #8: Interface Segregation Principle?

I thought it was a good paper to read. It makes sense to have as many loosely coupled components and doing that with your interfaces makes sense. This will allow you to have much more maintainable code since concrete classes have only what they need to function.

What was your experience of functions, closures, and decorators? (this question will vary, week to week)

I did not have any experience with closures and decorators in Python before. The lectures and the in-class practice we did help a lot in understanding how they work and their use cases. Decorators were super cool learning because they allowed one to “extend” a function without modifying the original function.

What made you happy this week?

I was happy that my group and I made good progress on phase 2. We have pretty much the bulk of it done and just have minor things to do before turning it in. It seemed like there was a lot of stuff to do when we first started but breaking it down into chunks helped make things a lot less overwhelming.

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

My pick-of-the-week is pnpm an extension of npm that is faster and more disk efficient. The way it works is rather than having a big node_modules folder that is often full of repeated packages if you have multiple projects on your computer, it shares the same package. It does this by pointing “links” to the shared package. By doing this, it is 2x faster when installing node packages. I recommend this to anyone that wants to have a better experience installing node packages.