Week's brief summary

I'll like to start this new refreshed blog by talking about some of the work I've been doing this week. Although the last weekend I had basically finished the assessment whose deadline was the 24th of April, I really spent some last editorial changes trying not to pass the 1000 words limit that was supposed to be for the 3 different reviews we had to do. It's doesn't look easy when you don't really know the final tool that is going to be used for that purpose: the only clue I had is "every word" counts...

 

Firstly, I tried my TexStudio word counter, and a online PDF, and the MicrosoftWord with different count results for everyone, which could make you start to be paranoid about this 1000 words limit: when you finally add at the bottom of the document "Total words: 999" you may suddenly think, ouch!!! I have 3 new words in my review, a total of 1002 #fail. When you fixes that, then you realize that you have to need to include the Examination Number in every page, after that you obtain a new count of 1008... are you kidding me?. Well in the end I was not completely sure if I did a good job regarding this issue... we will see :)

About the assessment, and taking into account that I must have spent on this module more than 100 hours in total, I think it was very productive. Reading The Innovator's DNA and Beyond the Obvious was enriching and about them I could just say that it's a recommendable reading. In my opinion I think that Beyond the Obvious was the winner since in the end it provides very useful stuff. Those Killer Questions are worthy to read.

Apart of that I have read 3 interesting papers related to the Visitor design pattern, any of them very instructive, specially when you realize that the same pattern my have implemented in different ways as they are explained in the Gang of Four's book (Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software). Well, let's say that there are very varied ways to implement the "essence" of the pattern ;). If you are curious enough you may have a look to these papers:

• The Essence of the Visitor Pattern
• On the efficiency of Design Patterns Implemented in C# 3.0
• Wal your Tree Any Way You Want

Needless to say, that I have found tons of interesting topics related to this area. The pile of papers pending to read is increasing, which is quite encouraging.

Finally, I didn't want to finish this blog entry without showing some of the "bread and butter" stuff I've been progressing. Basically, a first "working" simple Xtext-based ImperativeOCL editor. It's an extension of the official Eclipse EssentialOCL one which simply accepts the ImperativeOCL types, and since the term "working" is very ambiguous, I'll simply attach a small screenshot:

Have a nice weekend !!!