Skip to main content

Sprint 2 Retrospective (Capstone)

Although we have not been given anything to work on from AMPATH, save yesterday’s meeting, I have made the most of my time to learn as much as I could about Angular. I haven’t gotten all the way through the tutorial, but I want to emphasize learning it throughly over rushing it.

The first time I was going through the tutorial, I was well over halfway done when I realized I was missing one of the steps to get it to work. This happened early on in the tutorial as well, and I resorted to blindly copying and pasting every step again to get it to work. It turned out to be a very minor fix. I was much further in this time, and I was about to do the same thing, but I realized I would be wasting my time if I did that. If I didn’t understand the code enough to diagnose these simple fixes, I am not getting much out of the tutorial doing it this way.

I was talking to members of my team about it, and we came to the conclusion that even if we individually only got through the first few sections of the tutorial, our time would be better spent if we understood what we were doing thoroughly over completing all the sections without as good of an understanding of the concepts.

Even though we have not been doing a lot of work together as a team for the clinic, it is really nice being able to bounce ideas off members of our team. It is great  to have the ability to share resources with people I am working towards the same goal.

It feels like I am living out some of the apprenticeship patterns that are laid out in the textbook for this course. I am challenging myself to learn new concepts, even without a looming test or set deadline. I have gotten better and better into the habit of carving out a small chunk of my time to learning a new concept here and there. I hope this continues as this course develops, and I hope to continue this trait for the rest of my life.

Yesterday, our group liked the idea of working on the projects described in the videos in part 2a and 2b. I liked everything that I saw, and would be more than happy to work on this. It’s not certain if we will be the ones who get to work on this, but we will coordinate that with the other groups. I am very happy to get started. This is what I’ve dreamed about doing since I decided to major in computer science. It is really exciting making that happen.

I also read a part of Edward R. Tufte’s book Visual Explanations, where he has a page giving an example of what an effectively-laid out medical chart might look like (p. 111). Although this might be the only example I could find on something for medical use, I think this book might prove to be a good resource for displaying the data. I’m sure there is a lot to be learned even from the examples that are not specific to medicine.

The most useful tutorial I have found comes from Angular itself. It is a really easy-to-follow step by step guide that holds your hand through the entire thing: https://angular.io/docs

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Testing: Like Destroying Sandcastles

https://joecolantonio.com/testtalks/223-testing-dream-journaling-smashing-sand-castles-with-noemi-ferrera/ In this blog for software quality assurance and testing, I decided to return to the “Test Talks” podcast, presented by Joe Colantonio, for another episode (#223). In it, he sat down with Noemi Ferrera, a software tester for a Chinese mobile gaming company to get her take on the subject. Noemi gave a few interesting metaphors that I appreciated for how to look at testing. In one, she gave the example of going to a movie where you had already read the book. It was different than how you imagined it while reading it, and testing is a way of making the “movie version” fit the way you envisioned it playing out.  The other metaphor for testing that she gave was, if you were children at the beach, the developers would be the ones building the sandcastles, whereas the testers would be the ones destroying them. I don’t know if that would be the most accurate way of lookin...

Decorator Design Pattern

For this week's blog on Software Design, I decided to watch a short tutorial on one of the design patterns I didn't pick for a previous assignment. I picked Proxy Design pattern to cover before, and now I'm going back to learn about Decorator Design Pattern. It is only a thirteen minute video, so I won't be going as deep as I would had I picked it for the assignment. I am also going to talk about my reflections on it rather than create a tutorial, so I am not going to reteach it to the person reading this blog post. The tutorial I chose was made by Derek Banas on YouTube. He used an example of a pizza parlor to illustrate the wrong way to code it by using inheritance. He shows the problem with this because you would have to create a very large number of subclasses for all your objects (in this case pizzas). Composition, on the other hand, is a dynamic way of modifying objects. Instead of creating as many subclasses, you add functionality at run time. It has th...

Facade Design Pattern

For this week’s blog on Software Architecture and Design, I will revisit the same assignment that I have blogged about before. For the assignment, I had the option between three design patterns to write a tutorial for. I picked the proxy design pattern, and then I blogged about the decorator design pattern. Now, I would like to watch a tutorial on the third design pattern, facade, so that I might learn about all three. I chose to use the same YouTube, Derek Banas, that I used before for the other blog. I found his videos engaging and informative that I would like to learn about it again. I also like that it is fairly concise (11.5 min), which makes it much easier to rewatch sections that I don’t get the first time around.  It turns out that I did not understand it after finishing Derek’s video, so I turned to another video by another Youtube channel by Christopher Okhravi. Derek went straight into coding, whereas Christopher just drew diagrams and did not code. I needed m...