<commit_before>---
layout: post
title:  "Week 6 - The Sleep Deprived Post"
---

I'm currently writing this post after coming back from HackDFW, a student hackathon in Dallas that was organized as a collaboration between UT Dallas, SMU, and UNT. I mainly went to help Major League Hacking and the event organizers have a seamless event. I did spend a really long time talking to people on a lot of random things from Test Driven Development to why software engineers shouldn't be put into a box (with some awesome grad students from UT Arlington). Some of the conversations touched on diversity efforts, judging, and how much the weather in North Texas stunk. Originally I was going to study for my exam this week on the bus ride back, but I really couldn't turn off my brain from thinking about the past weekend. (Weird thing to think about: Turning off your brain to study.)

So I am going to relate this post as much as I can to my experiences as of recently in CS 373: Software Engineering. The idea of a hackathon is to build something new in 24-36 hours. It is has become quite common that if students are doing some kind of web development and using Python that they use Flask as a framework for their project. The speed at which a student can go from nothing to a simple working web app is crazy fast compared to what needed to be done years ago (or even with some modern frameworks). This leads to why I am such a fan of Flask as a framework and excited to get to use it in a academic setting. 

One other reason why I am super excited about using Flask is because I have never built out a REST API with it other than one [tutorial](http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/designing-a-restful-api-with-python-and-flask). From my experiences with Flask on smaller projects, it appears to be flexible for building lightweight REST APIs. It has extensions like [Flask-RESTful](https://flask-restful.readthedocs.org/en/0.3.2/) to help make the process even easier and other extensions that can help with the database layer and other stuff like forms. 

I'm also still formulating my thoughts on why I really love Flask and am extremely sleep deprived right now. Although that's a bad excuse, I really just want to build and see how things go. Who knows, I may even change my opinion on Flask through the process. <commit_msg>Added week 6 tip of the week, also nonsense<commit_after>---
layout: post
title:  "Week 6 - The Sleep Deprived Post"
---

I'm currently writing this post after coming back from HackDFW, a student hackathon in Dallas that was organized as a collaboration between UT Dallas, SMU, and UNT. I mainly went to help Major League Hacking and the event organizers have a seamless event. I did spend a really long time talking to people on a lot of random things from Test Driven Development to why software engineers shouldn't be put into a box (with some awesome grad students from UT Arlington). Some of the conversations touched on diversity efforts, judging, and how much the weather in North Texas stunk. Originally I was going to study for my exam this week on the bus ride back, but I really couldn't turn off my brain from thinking about the past weekend. (Weird thing to think about: Turning off your brain to study.)

So I am going to relate this post as much as I can to my experiences as of recently in CS 373: Software Engineering. The idea of a hackathon is to build something new in 24-36 hours. It is has become quite common that if students are doing some kind of web development and using Python that they use Flask as a framework for their project. The speed at which a student can go from nothing to a simple working web app is crazy fast compared to what needed to be done years ago (or even with some modern frameworks). This leads to why I am such a fan of Flask as a framework and excited to get to use it in a academic setting. 

One other reason why I am super excited about using Flask is because I have never built out a REST API with it other than one [tutorial](http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/designing-a-restful-api-with-python-and-flask). From my experiences with Flask on smaller projects, it appears to be flexible for building lightweight REST APIs. It has extensions like [Flask-RESTful](https://flask-restful.readthedocs.org/en/0.3.2/) to help make the process even easier and other extensions that can help with the database layer and other stuff like forms. 

I'm also still formulating my thoughts on why I really love Flask and am extremely sleep deprived right now. Although that's a bad excuse, I really just want to build and see how things go. Who knows, I may even change my opinion on Flask through the process. 

> Tip of the Week:
> Note to self: Study a ton for the exam on Thursday. WRITE CODE. RUN CODE. THINK IN CODE.
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