CS373 Spring 2020: Final Entry

Sonali Bhat

What did you like the least about the class?

I wish the lectures had a little more connection to the projects. The first project had very little to do with anything and seemed to be more about using Git and some other tools. I think it would have been better if it had to do with building a basic back-end or data scraper or creating a really simple front-end on our own, with lectures introducing the concepts/tools. That would at least have set us up with an introduction to start the website project.

What did you like the most about the class?

I really liked the relatively open ended nature of the projects. It was tough to learn things all on our own, but looking back, it was super rewarding. I’m so proud of my group and what we managed to accomplish in such a short time. I feel like I got a true experience of working on a project from start to end, with a real deliverable that I can show for it.

What’s the most significant thing you learned?

I think the most significant thing I learned was about designing and implementing an API. It was really cool to work with Postman and create a design and documentation for our API that our customers used to create visualizations at the end of the semester.

How many hours a week did you spend coding/debugging/testing for this class?

10 hours. Our group met often and we worked on our code either all together or in sub teams. I also spent time on my own at home debugging and testing additional code.

How many hours a week did you spend reading/studying for this class?

1–2? I didn’t feel like I had to study much for this class. Just by paying attention in class and looking over my notes for 10–15 mins before class, I was able to do really well on the majority of the quizzes.

How many lines of code do you think you wrote?

Maybe 600–800? However, a lot of that code was adapted from online tutorials and samples from documentation.

What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?

I’m really glad to have had the experience working with Docker. Though it was a pain to set up (especially on Windows) it’s really useful when working on a project with a lot of dependencies.

I’m also really glad to have had the experience working with SQLAlchemy, which made it so we didn’t have to deal with HTTP requests when querying our database in the back-end.

What’s the most useful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?

We used Microsoft Azure to scrape data sources and get the image APIs.

How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?

It was hard. That’s the honest truth. However, I believe that that’s what our future is going to look like when we work as software engineers. It was a really rewarding experience to accomplish so much on our own.

How did you feel about the two-stage quizzes and tests?

I really liked this system for assessments! It encouraged us to study before the first attempt, and also rewards us for taking the step to understand problems that we get wrong. I feel like when we take traditional one-stage assessments, we tend to not care enough to understand why we get points off, however this can be a great learning moment.

How did you feel about the cold calling, in the end?

It forced me to pay attention until I had been called in that round of cold calling. It was a little stressful and/or anxiety provoking, however it got easier as we heard other students getting questions wrong as well and there was no judgement from either Prof. Downing or each other. Overall, I didn’t love it, but it did keep me focused, which was a plus because it reduced the amount of time I had to spend outside of class to study for the quizzes/tests.

As a whole, I really enjoyed the experience of taking this course. Prof. Downing is a great lecturer and I’ve learned a lot -both from class and through self learning. I would definitely recommend everyone to take this course before they graduate!

-Sonali Bhat