CS373 Spring 2021: Nathaniel Jackson
What did you do this past week?
This past week, our group started work on Phase IV of the dynamic IDB website project. We had a little bit of code to clean and refactor within our code base, but most of the main components have already been developed. We met earlier in the week to discuss our presentation and to determine who was going to present what. Then we met again to work on our visualizations of data for our group and for our developers’ group.
What’s in your way?
We had some trouble integrating D3 into our React frontend, but we seem to have found a good solution to the problem. I’ll talk about what we discovered in the “tip of the week” section. Otherwise, now we need to pull the data from their database to plug into our models and touch up the aesthetics of the data visualizations.
What will you do next week?
Next week we plan to finish our visualizations and presentation, as well as record our presentation beforehand. Our group was more interested in the video presentation format as opposed to a live presentation, so we plan to do that in one of the Help Sections on Thursday.
If you read it, what did you think of the The Joel Test?
I did read the article on the Joel Test. I think most of the “checkboxes” on the Joel Test are pretty straight forward. Version control, being able to build the project in one command, CI/CD, testing, etc. are vital to effective code production. My favorite “checkbox” from the article was the Bug Repository, in which you document non-trivial bugs, their diagnosis, and their solution. This is helpful for all developers to check first if they run into one of these bugs, and then they can know who may have ideas if their bug is similar to another one in the repository.
What was your experience of Replace Type Code with State/Strategy (227)?
Refactoring code in an object-oriented programming system is super important! It makes for better and more clean code that requires less upkeep in the future.
What made you happy this week?
Last weekend I painted pottery at Cafe Monet with some of my friends, and today I picked up my finished piece! I made a coffee mug that was painted in various shades of brown, like how the milk looks when you first pour it into the mug. I’d recommend checking the place out with your friends if it sounds interesting!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is recharts, a D3 library specifically built for React. It is a great marriage of the two and makes for really easy charts and graphics within a React frontend.
