Joshua's Blog

 Hello, my name is Joshua Donovan. This is where I will be posting my blogs for WSU's CS-443 course. 

Hello! For this quarter’s blog I read a post written by Jeff Bridgforth, titled “ Think like a front-end developer. ” Coming to the end of the semester we have started working with the frontend, and I got the impression that it would be useful to see, as with my other blog posts, the insights someone who actually has experience working on it may have. As such, I wanted to find a blog that could give me an idea of the practical priorities and decision patterns used in real projects, this post does that well.  To quickly summarize, a front end developer is someone who designs what a user/client/etc. would actually see when they interact with a program. It encapsulates everything from the UI to how it interacts with the backend, or what goes on behind the scenes. Jeff outlines the basic mindset he believes front-end developers should have. He explains that the three main languages used for front end (html, css, and js) should be "partitioned" specifically for certain roles: html...

For this quarter's blog I read " The Day My Role-Based REST API Design Collapsed (and What I Learned) " by Sidharth Devaraj. The blog talks about REST APIs, specifically Sidharth's experience with them when he was new to backend development, and his reflections on a key mistake he made when designing his first REST API. To quickly summarize what that is; per GeeksForGeeks a rest API "...is a type of API (Application Programming Interface) that allows communication between different systems over the internet. REST APIs work by sending requests and receiving responses, typically in JSON format, between the client and server". Following the theme of my previous blog, this is a topic pertinent to what we have recently been doing in class, and something I would like to see a human perspective on to gain insight about how I may utilize it in the future.  Sidharth starts by explaining that he needed to make an API for an application he was working on. He mentions ...

 Hello! For my second quarter blog, I read a separate blog written by Yung Han Jeong, titled " Spaghetti Deconstructed: Lessons from my first refactoring ". As its name suggests, this blog talks about Yung's personal experiences and advice pertaining to refactoring. For those who don't know, refactoring is essentially improving existing code in a way that doesn't affect it's functionality. This can be as simple as changing variable names, all the way to completely restructuring the program. In our class this semester, for a very large portion of what we will be doing, refactoring is an integral part of it. I would say at this point I am pretty comfortable with the topic, however I figured that I would like some sort of anecdotal, first-hand account of someone's actual experiences with it, as everything we have been doing has been in a classroom setting.  Yung's blog recounts her experiences in refactoring some of her earliest code written when she was ...

 Hello! For my first real blog, I like to talk about an entirely different blog I read written by Fredrik Klingenberg, titled " UML Sequence Diagrams ". For one of my classes where we talk about software design processes, UML diagrams were something that was taught to us very early on, and I got the impression that they would be something I would see a lot of for the rest of my career. As such, I wanted to find a blog that could give me an idea of how they would be realistically applied, and after some digging I found this.  In the blog, he talks about not only what the diagrams are and how to construct them, but more importantly how to actually use them in a day-to-day basis. Firstly, if you are unfamiliar, a UML Diagram is a graphical tool used to visualize the structure and behavior of a software system. Think of it sort of as the visual equivalent of pseudocode, if you shifted the focus to more of an overview of the entire project. Visualizing the codebase in this manner ...

 Hello, this is nothing fancy, just a simple first blog required by my class