This week in Software Engineering, we were introduced to our second project, Netflix. When the Netflix assignment was first posted, I was really confused on what we were supposed to do, and it didn’t help that I missed the class where we went over it due to an interview. Even after my partner explained it, we were still unsure how to approach the problem. I think one of the reasons why was that the project is very open-ended and much of it is based on analyzing empirical data and making educated guesses off of the trends. In addition, much of the project involves creating caches of the given datasets or using other team’s caches, so there was a lot of work that needed to be done initially to get the appropriate information. It took a few days of work, but when we finally got the root mean square error under 1.00, it was really exciting.

Another thing that we more of this week was work with other people during class to discuss the problems we were given. I thought this group work added a lot to the content of the class and made it more interesting. It also helped me learn the material faster since we got a chance to try implementing some of the new concepts in the lecture.

For the tip of the week, my partner and I found the unittest mock object library useful in mocking out requests.get() to test whether we’re getting the caches from the correct location.