Sam Bryan

The long and short of the pattern is to not accept a lucrative position or promotion if it takes you away from practicing your technical skills. If those skills aren’t constantly honed, they will be lost or become outdated before long. A family friend was a midlevel manager at a software development company before he was laid off. He had gotten away from doing the technical work. The trouble was that most companies promote from within, so it was hard for him to apply for a job that he had before. It was also hard for him to start a job doing the technical side because those skills weren’t as fresh in his mind. There’s a good lesson to be learned from his story. I often hear from people complain their manager is out of touch. The pointy haired boss  from Dilbert strikes a chord for so many for a reason. Perhaps more fitting to this pattern is The Office’s (U.S.) Michael Scott. While he has his moments, he is by in large an extremely incompetent manager. However, he does go on so...

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 quality assurance, I wanted to review what we learned most recently in class. I decided to watch a relatively short (24 min) tutorial on Mockito. It has been over a week since I’ve seen it, and there’s another few days until we meet again. I could use the refresher before then. The tutorial I chose to watch was by a YouTuber named Walter Schilling. I thought he explained the concept very well. I will definitely bookmark his page for other concepts that I find challenging. I thought it was a little bit of a complicated set up. I don’t think it was necessary to see the UML diagrams or as extensive of a walkthrough of how his code worked. He didn’t go excessively in depth, but I understood it pretty well after he gave a  demonstration of the final code in action. (He typed in some inputs and showed what the output would be.) I didn’t need to know as much information on his example code. That’s not what I had come to see. When he got to the mockito section...