CS373 Spring 2021: William Wang

What did you do this week?

This week, I worked with my IDB team to finalize the searching functionality on our web app. I started by refactoring the API to perform all operations using the SQL database engine, as opposed to the Python loop over all rows we were using earlier. This made API requests significantly faster and improved our app’s performance greatly. I then used these requests to service our per-model and site search pages, for which I designed and implemented the React frontend components as well.

What’s in your way?

Not too much, really; I’ll be quite busy next week for various reasons but I feel at a pretty good place in terms of my progress with this class. So, I’ll probably take it easy on this class in the near future and prioritize my other tasks in the meantime.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I would like to review the actual SQL queries that our SQLAlchemy backend is emitting. I previously complained that SQLAlchemy tended to be pretty opaque with respect to what was actually being communicated with the database itself. Though I learned most of it along the way of the last phase, there are still some things I’m unsure about, such as how joins and relationships are handled. I’d like to have this figured out stone cold before the final phase of optimization.