Posts

Sprint #3 Retrospective

 Hello I cannot believe how quickly this year has come to a close. It seems like just yesterday I was struggling comprehending what I was doing in this course, but now I have gotten to the point where I feel like I have a grasp on how things are actually going. In terms of what got done, I implemented Rabbit at long last, and it only took me 3 sprints to get here! Along with that I made sure the messages we were sending matched the specifications posted on discord, and I made sure that the messages were only being sent if the requests themselves were valid (i.e. weight isn't null, and it won't take more than the inventory has). I think I really came into my own near the end of my time in this class,  I did a good job speaking to my group more often, I put out a number of good commits, and overall I had a better grasp on what was actually going on, which I certainly couldn't say at the start. Though if I had to pinpoint something that didn't work very well, I definitely ...

JUnit Blues

Hello!   With the semester wrapping up pretty quickly, and our last homework assignment being to design an in-class assignment, I've been doing some brushing up on JUnit testing. Specifically, assertions, which are the crux of how JUnit tests work, by telling a given test what qualifies as a pass or fail. The assignment me and my groupmates designed revolved around the use of various different kinds of assertions, ones that we didn't cover heavily in class.   As such, this week my blog of choice to read revolves around, what else, JUnit testing. Specifically, the article comes from Medium, who I've looked at before, and who seem to be quite the useful resource on covering both broad and specific computer science topics. I wanted to take a look at this specific article, mostly because I wanted to see some of the other topics involved with JUnit that we didn't cover in class. I intend on running Linux on my main PC once the semester ends, and seeing how to install JUnit o...

Sprint #2 Retrospective

Hello! It's that time of the month again, we've just finished up sprint number 2, and now I've got to write about how it went!  I think this sprint was considerably more productive than the last one (even if I still couldn't get my assigned issue done). I managed to parse out how I am going to make timestamps for the rabbitMQ messages, and I did a significant amount of testing with some files, to the point where I basically had everything working by the end of sprint 2. It would have been implemented were it not for the fact that I ran into some last minute errors that I couldn't get fixed in time. Like the last post I made, the merge request will be available at the bottom of the post. I think I did a much better job at communicating with my group this time around. I think I was a little shy before, plus overwhelmed at having to learn a new skill and be a productive member of a group. Now though, I've been pretty consistently talking to my group about what I...

Testing and Testing (One of them is a Fake).

 Hello! This week in class we've been discussing testing using fakes, more specifically with Stubs. Our first assignment this week told us about the different kinds of fakes used in testing, which I found a little confusing at first, since I would have liked to have seen a more literal example of all the different variants. That is why, for the sake of improving my knowledge on the subject going forward, since this is something we'll be talking about, I decided to do some reading on stubs and mocks, from a blog post written by Raphael F. on Medium.  The article spoke at length about the differences between mocks and stubs, and gave some meaningful examples of both. I appreciated the use of diagrams in the article, as it shows what each of them interacts with and how (i.e. A stub doesn't interact with a database, and is instead a hard-coded value to be grabbed for testing). That wasn't something that was immediately obvious to me in the assignments, and during our assign...

Sprint 1# Retrospective

 Hello!   This week marks the first week of sprint 2 proper, and as such I've been tasked with writing about my experiences with sprint 1. First of all, I implemented RabbitMQ on the inventory backend, which took a while for me to accomplish simply because most of what we are doing in this class is so new to me. I'll have a link to the merge request at the bottom of the page. I think our group functioned pretty well during our class meetings, there isn't that much I would change really. We were productive, everyone was super open to helping each other solve problems, and we laid out the plans for the sprint pretty effectively.  I think in terms of things that didn't go very well, I was having a ridiculous amount of problems setting up Visual Studio, and making the backend work. I should be through most of the problems now, (in theory), but during most of the setup process I was unable to build any of the frontends or the backends, which completely halted any progress I ...

Software Craftsmanship

 Hello!  I've had a bit of assigned reading to do for my capstone course, ans as such, I thought it would go the way of most readings of that ilk; incredibly dry and ungodly boring. But surprisingly I had a pretty good time with Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye.  The text captures something that I find to be incredibly important to the process of becoming a career programmer, the ability to be flexible. Much of my time spent learning to program has consisted of how to do things, but never why or when we should do them. Sometimes it feels like I have a fairly full toolbox, but I don't have the required knowledge to apply my tools in ways they weren't explained to me in. I'll admit, this is more of a personal failing I feel, but the point still stands.  Chapter 1 and the introductory paragraphs to Chapter 4 really stood out to me the most, as Chapter 1 goes into detail about what it means to be a craftsman, and an apprentice. It highlights th...

Test Test Test Redux

 Hello!   I'm still Camille and this is still my blog, I guess!   CS443