Getting Started... One Last Time

Hi, I'm Joaquin and I'm currently on my eight (and potentially last) semester of my Computer Science undergrad degree at ITESM. I'm also very happy to share that earlier this month, I started an internship as a Solutions Engineer @ Facebook!

I don't quite know what to expect from this course, but if it's anything like Programming Languages, I'm sure it will be very interesting, and I'm excited to see what lies ahead.

My tastes haven't changed much; I still enjoy playing tennis and playing videogames. However, with the pandemic, the former became impossible and I lost a bit of interest on the latter, which is why I started practicing calisthenics to stay active and bough a VR headset to keep the experience fresh.

With the quarantine, I stopped commuting everywhere, which means I haven't listened to too much music in the past year, and besides singles from some of my favorite artists, I've only listened to songs that were already on my repertoire. The lack of releases also meant that I haven't watched any new movies or series, but I rewatched some of my favorites such as The Office, Community, Airplane, and more.

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Is Design Dead?

This week, we had to read Is Design Dead? by Martin Fowler. Just by reading the title, the thought of agile methodologies popped into my head, since they do involve design, just not as much as we're accustomed to. And not too surprisingly, Fowler reached a similar conclusion: design is NOT dead, it has just evolved along with us to keep up with today's standards. Before, design was used to make sure that you knew everything you needed to get done, and it let you find any flaws in your plan beforehand. It was meant as an all-encapsulating process that all future code will be based on. Today, it has maintained its role as a guide, as to not make the developer feel totally lost, but with today's fast-paced work environment and ever-changing requirements, with the help of methodologies such as Extreme Programming, it has evolved to become more dynamic and easier to change. For my personal opinion, I've had experiences (both academic and professional) where a bit of desig

SOLID

This week, we read a very straight-forward chapter by Edward Guiness of the book Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success. It very quickly explains the SOLID principles, which are widely-known principles applied to object-oriented programming that have to do with minimizing dependencies between classes. I won't explain what each principle consists of (since it's very easy to find ), but I will share my general thoughts about them. I still remember when I first started university, my code consisted of one very long python file that you could very easily read from top to bottom; the concept of functions was still foreign to me, and when we started using them, we would split up all of our code into two or three functions and that was that. Since then, we've been introduced to many different ways to make code cleaner and easier to read, and one that's been repeated often is the Single Responsibility Principle, which I agree is very useful in or

Why is an architect?

This week's (very short) article, Who Needs an Architect?, Martin Fowler explains to us the different definitions of architects that exist in the software world. The first and most common definition, which Fowler disagrees with, says that an architect is (s)he who helps identify what the most important parts of a project are, in order to give it structure. However, it is also mentioned that these parts are usually the most important because they are the hardest to change, so an architect's job should also include reducing the amount of these parts. Following the logic, by this definition, an architect's job is to reduce the amount of architecture. The second proposed definition, which I also think I agree with, is that an architect's role is more like a guide's. His purpose is to help the team become better by using his expertise, and communicating with as much of the team as possible in order to remove their blocks. I think the word architect still fulfills thi

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