Sam Bryan

For my final blog for “Software Design and Architecture” this semester, I decided to research time management for doing software projects. This is an issue that I ran into creating my final project, and I thought it would be worthwhile to learn from my experience while it was fresh in my mind. I thought this would be particularly helpful because I would like to do a few projects for fun over the winter break. I don’t think that I’m alone in that without a looming deadline, what little time management skills I have tend to go out the window. I hope this will change this time. I doubt reading an article will transform me into an extremely productive person, but at least it might point me in the right direction. I can only hope. The article that I found was from *codeproject.com* and was titled “Time Management Tips for Developers.” I thought it gave some good pieces of advice. Even if you are not a software developer, you could benefit from all the advice given. I will focus on three...

For this week’s post for software architecture, I decided to explore pursuing it as a career. I have focused several of my posts in this blog to going into a career for software architecture and quality assurance, but software development is very appealing to me as well. Although I have found this class more difficult than the quality assurance class, I find the work we have done in this class very satisfying, and I would like to do something like this in my career. I found an article from “Lifehacker,” where they interviewed a software architect Harrison Ambs on what it was like to be a software architect. It focused less on what a software architect is, and more gave general career advice for someone in the industry. The final question in the interview said, “What advice would you give to those aspiring to join your profession?” He gave a paragraph with some good advice. (Starting with, “Always be willing to learn something even if you know you’ll be terrible at.”) However, I w...

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...

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...

For this week’s blog on Software Architecture, I listened to Episode 3 of the “Software Architecture Radio” Podcast, which featured Mark Richards, an independent software architect. He has 32 years in the industry, with more than twenty years as a software architect.  They mostly talked about the evolution of software architecture. Although some of the things they talked about went a little over my head, I was able to pick up on the majority of what they were talking about.  He divided up the evolution of architecture into five stages. He talked about evolution happening in vertical and horizontal slices, that is within each layer and one layer affecting those above and around it. The layers were (1) hardware, (2) software, (3) human interaction, (4) social interaction, and (5) the environment, such as the internet of things. He said one thing in particular, need, drives change the fastest. As an aside, he also said that that’s the best way of teaching something i...

For this week’s blog on software design, I chose to watch a video presented by Dr. Steve Bagley on some fundamentals of object oriented programming (OOP). I’m embarrassed to say that although I am taking several upper-level computer science classes, I am unsure I would be able to give a good definition of what object oriented design was. To be fair though, it has been several years since I have taken CS 101, and it seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. I felt silly learning about something so elementary again, but it made a lot more sense when I’ve had as much exposure to OOP as I have now. For the video, he uses a game of “Pong” as an example of how OOP might use objects to represent the “ball” and “paddles.” From there, he talked some about inheritance and touched on a few more topics, albeit briefly. The main reason why I didn’t understand the benefit of this way of programming is that I didn’t know how else you would do it. I didn’t realize that without declari...

I was interested in what someone from such a large website, eBay, would have to say about its architecture. There was a lot of takeaways from it, summarized in four main ideas: partition everything, use asynchrony everywhere, automate everything, and design the system keeping in mind that everything fails at some pint in a large distributed system. Although this is an older talk (from 2007), these all seem to be sound systems to design something so large. He referenced a theorem from 1998 that he said took a while to get traction. Likewise, I am sure his design principles have proven true for the last ten years. To be completely honest, there was a lot of industry-specific jargon used that went above my head. I took a lot of notes though, and looked up the terms I did not know. I still found it very interesting, though. I found it the most interesting that someone designing one of the largest websites in the world was incredibility realistic of the shortcomings of everything designed...

In computer science, there are a lot of things we would normally take for granted, but it might not be so easy to program. Take time, for instance. If we wanted to create an app to calculate how many seconds ago a time and date was, it seems straightforward. Of course we would account things like leap days, but as I discovered, it quickly becomes a lot more complicated than that. As Tom Scott explains in an episode of the YouTube Channel, “Computerphile,” a simple-sounding app like this can be jarringly complicated. For starters, to create this app for a worldwide audience, it seems reasonable to make it available in all time zones. To adjust it for each time zone seems straightforward enough. All you have to do is take the Greenwich Mean Time and add or subtract hours based on the time zone that the user is in, right? Not quite. Take daylight savings time, for instance. It varies from country to country when daylight savings starts, and then there are some states/countries that ...

Hello again! This is my first post for 343. Equally excited for this class as the other. Excelsior!