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Hidden Figures

Hi­, today’s entry is going to be about the second movie we watched on this course. This time I’m talking about “Hidden Figures”, an American movie that tells the story of three African-American women that worked for the NASA during the famous space race to first reach the space and safely come back between the USSR and the United States. Those three women are Dorothy, Mary and Katherine, and they were key during the launch of those first betas and successfully trips to space. First of all, as these women were very important employees inside NASA and that had a meaningful contribution to this space race, the fact that I hadn’t heard about them before really surprised me. In those times they were suffering two types of discrimination at the same time, being a woman and being Afro-American. I really liked how they manage to show how key they were in that project to gain respect and equality inside NASA. I think the main message of this movie is to demonstrate the importance of K
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Ethical Reflection on Ready Player One

Hi, today’s entry (and maybe the last one) is going to be a little different. It will be an ethical reflection about the course’s book called “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline.    This novel is about Wade Watts at some moment in the future with a complicated world situation. OASIS was developed by a programmer called James Halliday. Basically, any person could distract himself from the real world and hide or spend time inside this virtual one. This sounds like a normal game but it isn’t. Oasis included everything a person can do in the real world, from working and studying to practice hobbies and buying stuff, it is literally the same as the real world. Suddenly, James Halliday died but left a competition to win the whole control of his fortune, company, and Oasis. Obviously, Wade wins. I want to mention that this book was pretty interesting for me and I think I can say it was one of the most entertaining and funny lectures I've ever had. This just because I’m really exc
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An Introduction to Metaprogramming

Hi, today's entry is going to talk about an article called “An Introduction to Metaprogramming” written by our professor Ariel Ortiz in 2007. First of all, I just want to mention that I’m really impressed because I didn’t know that our professor had many published articles and papers (we saw the others in my other blog for Compilers Design course). Basically, as its name says, it talks about metaprogramming, which is defined during the article as a program that generates other programs or just program parts. It is used to eliminate or just reduce a “tedious” programming task. It is like instead of writing complex machine code programs, we use any high-level language and use the compiler of that language to do the translation into the programs equivalent in machine code (low-level language). I have to admit that before reading this paper, I hadn’t fully understood the metaprogramming meaning and importance. We used and applied that term in a past course called Programming Languages
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Microservices

Hi, today’s entry is going to talk about an article written by James Lewis and Martin Fowler called “Microservices” in 2014. Basically, by calling microservices, they are referring to like a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services. But something interesting is that there is not a precise definition of that type of architectural style, there are only common characteristics around distinct organizations, business capability, automated deployment, intelligence in endpoints and also decentralized control of languages and data. This was the first time I heard this term, and something strange is that despite I didn’t notice about its existence I’d used them sometimes. Later in the articles, the authors gave us some characteristics that any Microservice Architecture must have. They are the following: 1.       Componentization via Services:  This is telling us that by building software, we put together components. So, this archite
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The 4+1 View Model

Hi, today’s blog entry is going to talk about 2 videos and one article called The Elephant and the Blind Programmers, by Grady Booch.  The first video was about de 4+1 view, while the was more related to the article as both explains the Elephant and blind programmers’ case. In the case of the 4+1 view, there are five main aspects to consider: 1.      Logical view:  It’s the logical software’s design and what components will be made and how the should behave. Class diagram. 2.      Development view:  It’s concerned with the organization during development and the interaction between the program and its components. Component diagram. 3.      Process view:  Activity Diagram, it includes de concurrency and synchronized aspects, and also how the program functions. 4.      Physical view:  It’s how the software and hardware are related and their interaction, how the system looks like when finished. Deployment diagram. 5.      Use Case view:  It’s how the system interacts with
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Understanding the SOLID Principles

Hi, this entry is going to talk about a section called “Understanding the SOLID principles” from the book “Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success” by Wiley in 2013. Basically, the acronym SOLID is explained a round this book section. This acronym stands for five accepted principles about object-oriented programming and design: 1.       S ingle Responsibility Principle: It stays that a class should have just one responsibility. Despite the fact that this principle sounds easy, I found it a little bit complicated, because the explanation wasn’t direct and simplified. Also, the author mentioned that there might be cases in which a class might have two responsibilities. So, at the end, what exactly does this principle stands for? 2.       O pen/Closed Principle: It stays that a class or a function should be open for extension but closed for modification. What does this mean? Our code must have the capability of being extended, but we have to always
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WarGames

Hi, for this entry I’m going to talk about a 1983 movie directed by John Badham called WarGames. The story told in the movie is in the times of the cold war. Basically, there is a gifted and very skilled kid (talking about computers) who were able to hack the US Government defense computer. That computer was expected to be capable of analyzing and taking decisions, kind of machine learning, because, over time, it was learning. The genius kid, David Lightman, just wanted to enter to that computer just to play games, in this case, “Global Thermonuclear War”. The game started and, in order to stop the arrival of the 3rth World War, David and the creator stopped the machine. I had never seen this movie before, actually just heard about it one time in the novel we’re reading for this class (Ready Player One). This movie surprised me, despite the fact that I saw it 40 years approximately after its release. A computer capable of learning by itself and by the time? and also capable of sta
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