CS373 Summer 2018: Diemi Pham - Week of 16 Jul - 22 Jul

Week of 16 Jul - 22 Jul

1. What did you do this past week?

As usual, this past week I and my team moved forward to the next phase of the SWE project. For this phase of the project, I still work on the back end kinds of stuff and realized that building API was not so hard as I thought; of course, that was because I used a bunch of tools that helped make building an API is much easier. I was also introduced to Swift, a programing language for Apple devices, and started using Swift for my iOS mobile computing class, which started last Monday.

2. What's in your way?

One of the big issues for my team got into in the past week was deploying AWS docker. We could not make it run by the due day of phase 2 and spent a lot of time with Taben (one of our TAs) to figure it out. Moreover, collecting data for our project was also unexpectedly difficult because of the data's privacy.

3. What will you do next week?

Next week is going to be the last days for our SWE project and I am going to focus on finishing it with my team absolutely, also study for the next exam and write a tutorial for MySQL Workbench. I will also have homework for other classes as well, and work at the weekend. Next week will be my academic concentration week though.

4. What was your experience in relational algebra and SQL?

I have had chances to play with relational algebra and SQL before taking this class, and I have been interested still. It is kind of applications of logic that I learned in discrete maths class, and I'm glad I did well on the discrete maths (LOL). However, I did not know that there was only InnoDB engine supported foreign keys for relational database among the engines we were shown on last Friday. Foreign keys used to be a pain when I first doing SQL, especially when I struggled in circular foreign keys between tables. IMO, SQL is fun; actually, database management is fun and powerful because it can tell you more than what you can see from the tables themselves.

5. What's your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is Flask Marshmallow, an "Object serialization and deserialization, lightweight and fluffy", said Marshmallow team. Marshmallow is a powerful tool to consider if you are looking for something which helps build a RESTful API for your applications with minimal of your work.