Week 2

05 Sep 2015

Week two is over and done with. This week we focused on the first programming project, Collatz Conjecture. Professor Downing really does all he can to get you ready for the real word by trying to mimic things you’d have to do. Such as using version control, repos where you never commit to master, create and closing issues for a repo, continuous ous integration tools. Comparing it to what I did over my summer internship, it is actually very similar. We did use different tools, and building/compiling the code and running test suits did take a lot longer than what we’re doing for this first programming assignment, but it’s all the same concepts. 1) You NEVER commit to master. 2) You make sure everything works and all automated tests pass before merging into master. Even though we haven’t discussed the future projects, one requirement Professor Downing has is it that you cannot work with the same person more than once. I think this also mimics a real world scenario. You’ll be using someone else’s code base and you have to understand what they’re doing as well as conform to the standards they are using in their code. In the real world, you’ll get that developer job at some company that has been around for a few years, and you will have to understand and probably update or fix code that was written two or three years ago (maybe more), and you can’t just inject your own coding style into the code base (unless maybe you’re that good and they let you). With this only being the first project, and already packing so much real world scenarios, I’m excited to see what the future projects entail and what I can take away from them to use in the real world.

Tip Of The Week: Firebase

Firebase is a database system, they do more stuff, but I’m only familar with the database part. Over the summer I did a comparison between Firebase and Parse for an iOS app. Firebase was a lot easier to use and learn because they used native data structures (NSArray, NSDictionary), while Parse hads it’s own data structre (PFObjects, PFQuerys). Also, Firebase updates everywhere when the database is updated or altered. I liked this alot because you didn’t have to worry about the hassle of making background calls to update the database everytime. I know I read somewhere recently that Firebase was changing their pricing plan, but at the time of this project, Parse was significantly better with what you could get with a free account as well as the higher tiers when you get into paid services.