Arlon's CSUMB Blog

  First this week's required reflection: Rate the book "Software Engineering at Google"  1-best, to 5-poor  1.01 Rate the book "Full Stack Development"   1-best, to 5-poor  1.00 Why did you give those ratings? Software Engineering at Google is a (not so?) common sense book on broad methodology aimed toward specification of massive group collaboration giving adages for best practice and methodology in collaboration with large software projects that span through time across many different developers in long term cycles. One adage we learned right off the bat was that lots of small additions that work are a million times easier to manage than bigger, longer, more encompassing additions merged less often. I personally have found this true in my own projects, when I was a kid I started off the wrong way, building enormous projects that went nowhere - but I learned quick, and got past that, realizing what this book is telling us, incremental working stages are mu...

This week's required contemplation: How does React compare to other frameworks you have used for front end development?  Well in 2010 I worked for a startup working out of the Stanford Library (literally, room 200) that used the Zend PHP framework for developing a career connections website. It was a mess - an utter mess - and inspired me to either write my own framework or to never ever use one. But React is totally different, it's cohesive, effective, logical and there's distinct ways to accomplish common objectives, as well as simplifications to common JavaScript, adding convenience. The only problem I have with React is the HTML stuck in the middle of the JavaScript. I think it should be JSON there, too, where the HTML is. JSON has just one label where HTML has two for each element, a lot less characters overall, and for that reason I find JSON superior in all respects and capable of housing the same data references as HTML does. I created my own framework I call WebBla...

This week is awesome and we are learning Spring Boot Java JPA/ORM framework and it works really well, albeit a bit much on the side of info-overload. I'm a little behind on the learning curve, but things are starting to work now and I'm getting it quicker and quicker I think. I just now finally got create working request to database via parameters and am now working on update. Since I'm quite pressed for time, being behind, I still haven't gotten to the unit tests, so I'm just going to answer the required questions for class here: In your own words, what is TDD about? Test Driven Design to me is about looking at what you are creating from all possible angles to minimize tricky-to-spot inconsistencies later. At this stage in my knowledge process, although this could change, I also feel like it's a little about guaranteeing you understand the tools you are working with enough to be able to forward and backward engineer them so to speak, writing what you want to wo...

Before class this week, to me, term Software Engineering meant the act of architect-ing an enormous system of features that fit together perfectly to create the ideal software solution for the need. After this week I have learned that the term means to the world the implication of utilizing an organized long term team dedicated to the project and its cohesion, complete with an update pattern, code reviews and an entire framework of practice in addition to whatever frameworks of software are being used. Software Engineering takes into account risks and complexities of decisions that can affect the project and takes consideration of intent to bring the project through coherently into the future through long term software changes inside and outside the project. Iterations of features are a focus which I naturally have used on my own because it makes sense to continually keep a reality check of a working feature set. I've been programming for decades and when I was a kid I had fun cons...