Lecture

Dr Damith conducted first part of the lecture, which touches on presentation skills. Unlike typical lectures of this nature (eg. those in CS2101), I find the lecture quite interesting as there were many useful pointers that are logically sound and yet commonly overlooked.

The second part of the lecture is conducted by Su Yuen, who touches on UI/UX design and brought our attention to pre-designed website templates that we can purchase to accelerate the development process.

This reminds me of a classic literature by Frederick Brooks: The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks postulate that the very nature of software precludes any invention that could have a multi-fold improvement in software development productivity, and therefore there is no silver bullet, which culminated at the famous quote:

The best way to attack the essence of building software is not to build it at all.

Like Su Yuen, Brooks also asserted that software should be purchased off the shelf whenever possible.

Yet, despite the advice from these brilliant individuals, I remain unease about using pre-designed website templates.

First, we have to spend considerable effort in searching for and evaluating a suitable template that is inline with our design style and technology stack (eg. React + Redux).

Next, we have to become familiarized with the code base and either adopt the code organization and style of the existing code base or adjust it to our liking.

As web development is a rapidly evolving field, it would be hard to find a well written code base that satisfies the requirements and employs the latest web technologies (eg. ES6). In the end, we might end up having to modify so much of the code base that we might as well have written it from scratch.

Yet, the very nature of software, in which a copy can be provided to another user at no marginal cost, compels one to believe that there are certainly scenarios in which developing on top of a purchased software can be more efficient than building it from scratch. Nonetheless, we should not rush into purchasing website templates and careful consideration has to be made with regards to the suitability of the chosen template for the task at hand.

Assignment 1 tidbit

When a component view is shared on Facebook, an URL link must be created that can be referenced back to the component view.

As some of our component views to be shared are collapsible panels and modals, it is slightly unconventional to control their state (collapsed, opened) through URL routing.

In the end, we manage to resolve it rather elegantly with React Router without compromising on performance or the Redux principle of single source of truth through  components such as Switch as well as push etc from the react-router-redux bindings.