CS373 Spring 2021: Brian Wang, Blog #6
3 min readMar 8, 2021
- What did you do this past week?
My group and I spent most days meeting up and working on the project. I implemented a Table component for two of our model pages. Later, I worked on the technical report. It was a little pressuring to make sure that we had everything we needed for Phase I of the project. - What’s in your way?
I think I just had a lot of assignments to think about this week. I had a history essay due Friday, the project was due Saturday, a contest on Saturday, history quizzes for Sunday, and a big math worksheet for Monday. As for the website, understanding React is definitely a big challenge for me. It seems like every tutorial I read had a different way of making tables. I only just learned that React Bootstrap has its own Table too that I could have just imported. I am also finding it really frustrating to read the tutorials where they say they are going to build some component, then say “And here’s the code” without explaining it fully, because I learn almost nothing from that. - What will you do next week?
Next week, I will definitely relax a bit after catching up on history lectures. I also have to prepare for a math exam on Friday. But I am very excited for spring break! My team and I will probably discuss the project for Phase II, as we had several ideas that we could not implement yet. - If you read it, what did you think of the Open-Closed Principle?
I agreed with the overall sentiment of the article. I do not think the open-close principle should be applied to every piece of code we write though, as I think it is too extreme and prone to many of the same problems that it was trying to solve itself. - What was your experience of iterators and reduce2? (this question will vary, week to week)
I learned a lot about iterators! I never knew why Iterators were a separate object from the Iterable until Professor Downing explained that we want to be able to iterate over them multiple times independently. I always thought that the Java iterator way was a little cumbersome in syntax, but now it makes sense why they chose to have it function that way. As for reduce2, I thought making the seed optional would result in the value of the seed be the identity element of the binary operation in reduce2, but it makes sense to just discard the seed if it is not used and just apply the binary function on each of the elements in the iterable. - What made you happy this week?
My team and I placed fifth in the contest yesterday! I am extremely stoked. Among UT teams, we placed second. Unfortunately, UTD stole first place, and Texas A&M took second and fourth place. - What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip of the week is that React Bootstrap has implementations of Grid and Table already that are ready to use. I used a tutorial of React that created their own Table component in React that involved four separate components, and I didn’t realize that React Bootstrap already had one until after I already made my own. I will be sure to use the ones in React Bootstrap in Phase II!
