Voyages of a Software Dev Intern Thru The Early Years

One of the things I learned from revisiting C#II's project, eDevices was that planning out what your database schema is going to look like is pretty key to determining how easy your life is going to be down the road. In C#II, the focus appeared to be on breaking up the bigger project into smaller iterations that were built on organically--which was GREAT until I tried to implement a feature that hadn't been planned for in an earlier iteration, one that required changing one of the fields on the Policy entity. I managed to break all functionality because the Policy entity no longer matched what was expected, and I had to completely redesign 90% of my application's business logic to account for this new feature. This led to further frustration when I realized that I didn't properly manage my code first migrations for this series of changes--again, they happened organically during the class without any thought or discussion as to how to go back and make changes. Had t...

So much of this summer (and before, but it's a little different when one is being paid to solve problems) was learning that the big obstacle in development is filling in the gaps. The gaps between what a library is meant to do and what you need it to do, the gap between knowing a service can do the thing and knowing how to make it do the thing, the gap between knowing what broke your application and why it broke it, and many many more. I found the software development equivalent of "telling time by the stars" is sifting through Stack Overflow, Github wikis, discussion forums, and sometimes official documentation to find a solution. So what? That's software development. Google is your friend.  It is, but those forums--the library developers, the helpful souls on Stack, contributors to discussions of all kinds--are by and far time tellers . They *get* what is going on, and they can tell you exactly what time it is--which is great for the original asker ...

The Old Goal, Revisited Quick redirect (more to refresh myself than anyone who is going to read previous posts and then this one without feeling any gap in time--kinda like binge watching an older show on Netflix wondering why the season in 2007/8 was only 1.5 real episodes): This blog was initially created to serve in an alternate timeline where I did not have an internship over the summer. My goal was to develop a web and/or mobile app from scratch, as a way to keep my skills sharp and prepare for graduation in December. This blog was supposed to be a way to document to potential employers "Hey look--I can do the things, even if no one has paid me to yet! And I can write about them, with personality even!"  So What Changed? A late but extremely welcome change to this plan was an offer to intern at OrangeBoy, Inc here in Columbus--an exciting small firm that combines a software-as-a-service platform called Savannah with public service consulting expertise to help libra...

The activity diagram is all well and good, and can even be super useful in a lot of cases. But for my money, so far in my limited experience, the sequence diagram is where you really start to get a handle on what you need to do as a programmer. Before the sequence diagram, you're dealing with steps in a process. What needs to happen, in what order, and you could just as easily be talking about employees or way stations or widgets or nothing at all. They're really about systems analysis--that high level, what needs to happen kind of stuff. Really important work, but totally dull from a programmer standpoint. The sequence diagram is where we start seeing method names and parameters being laid out. The interaction between classes and layers. You start to see what methods you'll need, in what classes, and get a feel for what properties those classes will need. You can see the flow of the data from the start of the operation to the end, note the inputs and the outputs. I...

I mentioned it earlier at some point, but I'm not following the traditional method of system analysis and design as taught in my class. I'm skipping quite a few steps, and really what I'm planning to end up with is a little disjointed. However, I have some reasons for that--namely that in a situation like this, I feel going whole hog on the discovery phase is redundant. For instance, domain model and entity relationship model. If a student had come to me and described the problem and asked for a solution? Yes. Absolutely. I would need to sketch this out--what things am I working with? Which things are going to live in the database? Does a course have a grade like a planet has a moon, or is a course and a grade more like Mars and Uranus? These are important questions that need answered before you can get into the meat and potatoes. But...I already did that. Months ago. Before I knew what a domain class model even was, but I have the relationships and the entities all l...

So I've got use cases figured out. Not all of them--only a fool or a genius thinks he can sit at a desk away from the end user and think he's got all the use cases figured out (and a genius would never truly believe it). But you can't sit around trying to anticipate every possible use case before you start, so once we have enough to cobble together a complete program or part of one we can move on for a bit. Side note, this is the beauty of the agile approach: "Yeah, we know we gotta go to the moon. But we have to do it in 10 years, so we can't spend 5 years thinking up every problem we might need to solve before we start solving them. How about we start with 'design a rocket that reaches orbit without killing anyone' and build on that when we finish?" That's called an iteration, but more on that later. Fleshing out what that use case needs is the next step, and there are a couple tools I remember being taught. One of them is the activity diagra...

They told me in my CSCI-1275 Systems Analysis and Design course there's a tendency for programmers to just start coding stuff without thinking, and this was nigh on tantamount to total catastrophe. I didn't fully understand this until a little later in the semester. We had just learned about arrays and collections in my CSCI-1630 C# Programming I course, and I found this to be a perfect excuse to write a little application that would synthetically divide polynomials . (That's a really great way to master synthetic division, actually, if you're interested in brushing up on that skill. Although my wife still insists the time would have been better spent putting more time into my algebra homework. Two types of people...). At any rate, long story short: I made the program work perfectly, for 3rd degree polynomials that divided evenly. Then I realized it broke when I tried a polynomial of the 4th degree. And then again when the 3rd degree polynomial had a remainder. ...