Week 8

Class:
This was rather a short week. Class was cancelled as the professor had to take care of some official UT business on Friday. We also had a guest speaker on Wednesday. The guest speaker was from a local austin company that makes software for mobile devices for various clients. The topic of the lecture was about responding to change in the world of software development. Imagine that you have written thousands of lines of code for a specific platform and then all of a sudden the company that produces that platform decides to do a major change in its latest iteration of the platform. All of a sudden your code is broken. The task of having to conform to the new platform can be made much more manageable by using the SOLID principles discussed in class. Such was the case when Apple released IOS 7. Companies that had written code using the SOLID principles were able to quickly interchange small portions of code that connected their software to the underlying platform and the rest of the pieces worked as they should with minimal to no changes at all. Other companies had to start from scratch.

Project:
When the graph project was initially released it seemed a tad bit overwhelming. The skeleton code contained small hints from the professor with regards to what needed to happen but I had several questions. We ran out of time on Monday during class to ask questions so I had to resort to piazza. This time for the project I had decided to go solo. On my last project, I found myself and my partner working on the project at erratic hours and I didn't want to repeat this for the final project. After some struggling I asked myself "what would be the right way to do this?" and so I decided to first write the test cases. I read the specification provided carefully and tested every single function I could very carefully. As I created these test cases I had a way better feel for what the project required. The rest became a cakewalk and I was able to quickly finish the project. I'm officially ready to turn it in 4 DAYS EARLY!!! :)