Welcome to Week 2 of the CS 373 Blog.

1. What did you do this past week?

   This week in the course was quite action packed. I learned about a lot of awesome new tools that we have been using for Project 1. Between working on the project and writing this blog, I’ve gotten much more comfortable using git, which I’m sure will be a valuable tool in the future. The project has also required the use of another awesome tool, Travis CI, which is used for continuous integration. In other words, it is basically an instance of a virtual machine that you configure using a file within your github directory. The server then watches your github repo, and every time you update, a VM instance runs tests that you specify in the configuration file. This is a good way to make sure that updates to the code don’t break existing functionality elsewhere.

2. What’s in your way?

   This project uses code written in Python, which I haven’t worked with before. It has been somewhat of a challenge, but I am slowly getting more used to Python’s syntax. I’m also learning different features of the language that make certain tasks much easier. Overall, I think that by the end of the course I should be more familiar with the language.

3. What will you do next week?

   I’ll finish up Project 1 this coming week. I will also continue learning more about Javascript and Extreme Programming through the assigned readings. I think this will be an intense week and that I still have a lot to learn about the project.

4. Experiences

   My overall experience this week in the class has been good. I’m adjusting more to the flow of lectures. I quickly learned that going far with the project at the beginning makes information in lecture feel much more relevant.

5. Tip of the week

   On the topic of learning Python’s syntax, I’ve decided that I’d like to learn not only acceptable syntax, but good style convention as well. pep8 is a tool that can automatically check Python code against the conventions of an official style (PEP 8). It should be useful when writing code throughout the course.