CS 373 SWE Spring 2020 Week of 11/8: Rishi Salem

What did you do this past week?

This week, my group started planning our approach for the final phase of the group project. We outlined our presentation, determined which types of refactoring we had yet to do, and started coming up with possible visualizations for our data. All in all, it was a productive week, and we have laid the groundwork to finish the project!

What’s in your way?

Right now, our largest roadblock is time, as we need to plan meeting times to get together and work on everything. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue, though, since we can work on the project with as few as two people at a time.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I will work on refactoring and help my group with the visualizations and the presentation. Since we plan on recording the presentation, I will probably contribute some voice recordings as well.

If you read it, what did you think of The New Methodology?

I appreciated reading about the difference between engineering methodologies and the strategies used in software engineering. I hadn’t thought about the fact that software engineering was almost exclusively a design process, and that the construction stage of computer programming was almost exclusively done by the compiler. Having that context makes the sue of agile processes make a lot more sense!

What was your experience of SQL? (this question will vary, week to week)

SQL is a very different language than I’m used to, so I’m glad to get some experience with it in class! It’s amazing how much you can do with so few commands. It can’t do everything, of course, but what it does, it does very well!

What made you happy this week?

I made soup yesterday, and it turned out quite well! It was very satisfying.

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

My pick-of-the-week is time blocking. Sometimes, when you just have too much work and many projects you are juggling, it can be helpful to set aside concrete blocks of time for each project. While you won’t be able to finish any one project in that time block (unless you’re really lucky), it will keep you from constantly making context switches between your projects and therefore reduce your overhead. It also lets you focus on one task without stressing as much about the others.