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Week 7 blog

This week I wanted to do some research on potential technologies that could be used within our Hinsdale Wave Lab project. As I am tasked to handle the lab computer aspect, I did some research on National Instruments labVIEW. The research consisted of some documentation and YouTube videos to get orientated with the software. It seemed pretty straightforward as the library is programmed to be used on the specific instrumentation. I still need some familiarity with the software, but it shouldn’t be too much of a hurdle at this point. I also looked at some xCode and swift programming. I am used to android studio and making apps for the android platform, but there are a lot of high level similarities between the two and it has great documentation and youtube tutorials. It helps that IOS developing has been a trend lately and a lot of people are doing it. Earlier in the week we worked on the group team design document. It will serve as a living document that we will look back on when developing the system. We need to make sure each part is implemented, and that it meets the standards of our project partner. I’m sure the document will change over time as our needs are shifted, but for the most part everything should follow the design document. We may switch technologies used if we see a better fit for our application, but that’s about it. Now, I am just excited to start developing the system as I feel like we only have a little bit more research to tackle this problem. This project as a whole feels a lot like my internship last summer, which was when I learned the most about being a software developer. I hope to learn a lot during this project to take it into my future projects and tasks.

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Blog week 6

This week I looked into a few potential technologies that could be used with our project. First off, I looked at some beginner IOS development tutorials as I am more familiar with android studio and would need to learn how to make apps on that platform. It was very interesting to see how apps are built on IOS. It uses its own swift programming language. Swift is a compiled general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language that is expressive and concise. The other thing I researched this week was writing simple code. It is important to keep your code simple without extraneous code that you do not need. Making it simple not only make it better for scalability, but it is easier to understand from another developer who didn’t work on it. If you have extraneous code or duplicate code, it could make developers wonder why that is there before they realize you do not need it. In code, everything should be designed that way for a reason, so it makes other developers question why that is there before it is obvious to them. Simple code will also cut down on development time and the design decisions will be specific making you think about the design more. My last internship we worked a lot at refining the code that we have, constantly refactoring to make it as simple as possible. All of the code in the system should be there for a reason, and if you decide on implementing it another way, the old implementation should be deleted. Throughout the development process, you should always look back and see if there is a better way to implement that is more intuitive. Chances are, the first time you implement something that you are not familiar with, there will be refactoring needed. Once you become familiar with technology then it will be easier to get it right the first time, but otherwise, there should always be room for improvement and simplicity.