CST 438 - Week 6

This week we started our foray into Design Patterns and their application. We spent time this week studying some of the many various patterns that have been established for use by designers and are working on implementing designs into our own project. As part of the reading this week we were supposed to study a variety of different design patterns. I decided to look into the Filter, Bridge, Facade, Mediator, Iterator, Observer, Strategy, MVC, Singleton, and
Prototype Patterns. I thought the Bridge was an interesting pattern to learn about in particular as the bridges allow for the functionality of the concrete classes to remain independent of the interface implementing classes, I also was surprised by some of the similarities between the Mediator and Bridge Patterns. One pattern that stood out to me was the Facade Pattern and it seems like this is one pattern that developers may implement without even knowing it as many of the “under the hood” methods and functioning are often hidden from the end user as they utilize an entirely different interface with the program. It was also nice to study up on the MVC pattern, which I believe my team and I will be working on this next week, we’ve had a few things come up this past week but are planning on setting aside a few days to work on the project together.

CST 438 - Week 5

This week was an interesting one. I had a few things pop up in my personal life that made things a little hectic for a brief period during the week. But the instructions were quite interesting this week as far as homework went. Some of the team, including myself, were somewhat unfamiliar with the tasks necessary for the coursework as well as the stack we are using, but luckily AB aided us in getting up to speed and walked us through the how to set up our environment and get started working on the project and how to write the test units for the project. We worked together on the unit tests on our branches for the project.

CST 438 - Week 4

This week we had quite a bit of reading and videos to cover for our assignments. It was interesting to go through and see others research about what were some of the most common reasons for failures in a project. The disasters that can result from misunderstandings and miscommunication are quite apparent and the emphasis for the need to clarify and comprehend each other when working with others was glaring. It was also interesting to see just how important the creation of requirements are in the beginning, and through the lifespan, of a project. Miscommunication, unclear requirements or a lack of all the necessary stakeholders can doom a project to failure even before production can start. This week we had a group project consisting of creating diagrams for our upcoming project. It was nice to work with everyone and hammer out a schedule to meet and work on tasks.

CST 438 - Week 3

This week we had quite a few interesting articles and videos to cover for our assignment. We covered “white box” testing which is an interesting and seemingly straightforward way to test a program. There was some testing called EP/BVA which was very new to me with its boundary checking which was a little weird to think about given the example application. I did have a little trouble understanding what the author was meaning in some of the questions that had grammatical errors, but overall it was an interesting and worthwhile article. We also are starting to get into stride on our project, deciding when to conveniently communicate and where to start working on the project.

CST 438 - Week 2

This week we met with our teammates and began deciding what we would like to work on for our project. We have decided to build a cryptocurrency price tracking site where a few different currencies will be displayed with data relating to their real time pricing. Also there will be a subscriber form for people to be notified by email when a specific currency reaches a certain price. We have our repository, slack and pivotal tracker set up and I believe it should be a good project to work on.

CST 438 - Week 1

This was the first week of our new course, CST 438. It looks like it is going to be quite interesting, and involve quite a bit of both individual and group projects. It was interesting this week to get started with AWS and launching, and signing into, our first instances for practice. Reading up on the Plan and Document style and the Agile style were both quite informative in regard to how a company and team will operate together to work on actual large-scale projects. As we proceed it will definitely be useful to learn about these methods and apply them with my teammates in order to gain experience with these real world practices.

CST 361s - Week 8

This was the final week of the course and was a shorter week then normal. It has been a bit of a scramble attempting to deploy our working site, but I think we are getting close. After attempting to deploy to a few different hosts we finally settled on DigitalOcean and are waiting to hear back from CalGE in order to get the go ahead with launching the site. We are turning in all of our papers we can today, the others we have to wait to hear back from CalGE before submitting and then soon will be deploying the site. I am excited at what we were able to accomplish in less than a four week period, all things considered, and the site itself works well locally.

This week my total service is at 43 hours.