Something I learned about this week was just from the discussion board for this class, and that’s the Singleton design pattern. I think I had learned about this in my software design course, but that was more theory and never something I had put in practice. I think at the time I didn’t even know what I would use that for or really why it needed a specific name. My previous view was that I would always just create a class as normal and have one instance and in that case it was more flexible anyway in case multiple instances were needed. But if I’m understanding everything correctly, the whole point is the inflexibility. The post from the discussion board discussed its uses while multithreading which is a concept I’m more familiar with, but not enough so that I could make particular use of the singleton design pattern while using it. What made more sense to me was using it to track persistent data in Unity and other permanent states. We could create that object right off the bat and then not really worry about having to track it for its entire life.
As an overall reflection of the term, I feel like it’s been going very fast. It’s already the beginning of week 7 which means only four more weeks left of actual lectures to attend. Next term I will be online 100% so I’m excited for that. The on campus courses that are being taught remote I feel suffer a lot when they simply try to recreate the environment of being in person. In my opinion it’s impossible to simulate that experience on Zoom so they should just lean into teaching it like a remote class with a little bit of in person flavor, such as break out rooms or presentations.
