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Showing posts from October, 2021

APIs and REST APIs

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Last week we talked about APIs in Activity 12 and I want to go more in depth about APIs and what a REST API is since I don't really know what they are. API stands for Application Programming Interface and it is a set of definitions that allows two applications to talk to each other. Almost every application uses an API to communicate data from your device to a server. The server has its own APIs to receive that data and interpret it, and then send it back to your device. Then the application translates that data into a readable format for you. You do not have to know how they are implemented into your application, which can simplify the application development and save a lot of time.  APIs can also give security by only allowing certain data through and not all the data. For example, when you buy an item on an online store, you tell the store what items you want to buy and the store tells you what you need to pay. No other information fro...

YAGNI.

Hello and welcome back to my blog! In this blog, I want to discuss YAGNI, which stands for "Ya ain't gonna need it" or "You aren't gonna need it." My professor for CS-343 briefly mentioned it in class one day and I wanted to go over it more in depth. In the past, I've done something in my projects where I should have followed the concept of YAGNI instead. I made several methods to change a variable before I actually made the main methods of what that variable would do. In the end, it turns out the methods I made were useless toward my goal and I lost a lot of time. I hope to start applying the concept of YAGNI to my future programming in order to not waste time. YAGNI is a really important concept in programming. Basically it means programmers and developers should only implement classes, methods, or whatever things they need only when they need them. By doing this, you can avoid doing unnecessary work and save a lot of time. When you think ahead and try...