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Software Craftsmanship

  I have been trying to avoid of thinking of programming as a craftmanship since some years ago because we were kind of thought that it was incorrect. During our software development courses we were taught that treating it as a craftmanship was what caused it. But the way uncle Bob explained it as a craftmanship did resonate with me as indeed you do feel proud of your code when it works, and when you manage to program an elegant solution or a clean code it does feel better. Also, everyone has their own way of programming for example when in a group project I see a variable with an unholy name such as ‘iiiiiiiiiii’ I immediately ask Óscar if he did it, and with people you have programmed multiple times you get a feeling of how they code. Maybe it is not a wrong way to see code after all if you can follow the software craftmanship manifesto, which indeed as they say it is not nearly as popular as the agile manifesto. The points in them do sound like really good programming practice...

Hidden Figures

  It was the first time I had seen the movie Hidden Figures, I really liked it. It was a really nice story about women and especially black women and their contributions to science. I believe it is important to recognize the role of women in science and engineering. Also, the movie helps as a grim reminder that segregation was not that long ago, that it was less than 60 years ago, and that there are still people that lived through that period of time. Of course, I am not saying that racism is no more, but we have made progress on that, nowadays there aren’t segregated bathrooms. The part where the boss of Katherine broke the sign in the bathroom so that she would not have to go to another building. Also, the actress of Katherine did an excellent job ranting about why she missed like 40 minutes every day, you could see the frustration with circumstances she could not control. There were several good scenes in the movie, but the one I might have liked the most was when Mary Jackson...

Is design dead?

  “Any unneeded complexity makes a system harder to change in all directions except the one you anticipate with the complex flexibility you put in”. I believe that quote of the reading is the one that does a better job explaining why you need simplicity in the code and the strong point of programming for the present, not for the future. As indeed making a part of my code easy to modify would need that I make the assumption of what type of change would be needed in the future. I really like his moderate posture or coward as he calls it because in some of the things he mentions regarding design or having absolutely no architecture at all, do sound too extreme especially when in situations where is clear from day one that you do need a database. I particularly like his posture in regards to architecture of doing it, but take it as a sketch not something written in stone as you do not know what possible requirement changes come in a project or what specific issues come during the progr...

Who needs an architect?

  The reading did raise two important questions one that I had thought of before and one that I had not, and I believe the one I had not thought about is important to answer the other one. The one I had not thought about was, what is software architecture? I just took the definition given in class at face value, and that definition was really similar to the one given by the IEEE. I just accepted that architecture was that even though it was abstract enough to not be sure what specifically entails the term. I believe that those cynical definition given by the author feel more specific, like they help more to recognize what is software architecture. The question I had already asked myself is, when does someone becomes and architect and what are the qualifications? I asked myself this because seeing the tittle I just thought I definitely am not an architect, but what would it take to become one, or when do you know you are one. The tittle sounds kind of arbitrary because as seen in ...

Software Architecture

  I hope that during this course we can learn how to make a good software architecture, because I have read about it in several courses and as the chapter says there is no code without architecture I have done architectures although probably not being as conscious of it as I should have been and I have never known if my architecture is good or bad and how I can improve it. I understand the concepts seen in class, but I have never been told you could have reduced this class into this, or this class does to much. Also, I have never had to do maintenance on a software, so I have never experienced the results of a bad architecture, the closest was when I had to refactor entire classes made by my teammates in videogames. Learning how to better design a software architecture is something I would like to see during the course. Overall, it was a nice chapter as it allowed me to remember what I saw in other courses in a really short time and I was able to understand some things like the F...

Moon Machines

  It was a really interesting documentary that showed that in our field we have management problems since the beginning, and it is something that may not have changed much at all even 50 years from the Apollo 11 launch. Also, I had not realized how many people or how resource intensive the Apollo 11 project required. When it said that the project used 60% of the chips in in the USA it dawned on me how resource intensive the project must have been. Another dawning moment was realizing that the Apollo 11 was the first-time human lives where in the hands of software and how it becomes more commonplace. The Apollo 11 mission on the software side looks like it suffered through a lot of issues with its design, its management and its documentation. It sounded crazy that no one knew what the alarms were, and that the only guy who documented something was mocked for doing so. Also, the crunch times of the project sound insane, referring as most of them divorcing because of how much time t...

Welcome to my third blog

Hi, my name is Leonardo Castillejos Vite, a computer science at Tecnológico de Monterry currently studying the 8th semester. My friends call me Leo. About me my Hobby even before the lockdown was playing videogames, but right now I’m using them as a way to keep contact with my friends that I have not seen in a few months. Right now, the games I’m playing are Valorant and League of Legends. I suck at shooters and my internet connection in Oaxaca is awful so I’m just being carried by my friends, I hope that soon optical fiber is installed so I stop having so much issues with my network. I expect that during this course I become better at designing software, so I can create better quality software and apply it in my professional life. Also, I expect to learn Ruby as learning a new language is always good and from what little I have seen it looks like I will like it.