CS 373 Spring 2020 — Final Entry: Chinmayee Kulkarni
Hi everyone! This is my final blog entry for CS 373: Software Engineering. Before I dive into the details, I want you to know that every aspect of this course was well-thought-out and is integral to the learning experience even if things can be quite mind-boggling at times. Without further ado, these are my final thoughts on SWE.
What did you like the least about the class?
Unfortunately, I was not a fan of the HackerRank exams. :( This is just a personal preference. For me, time just seemed to fly by during these exams.
What did you like the most about the class?
I think what I’m about to say is quite contrary to what most people say about this class, but I love that there is a disconnect between the project and lecture content for the most part. This made me feel like I learned more from the class. Not only did I learn Python, SQL, and refactoring techniques but I also learned the different web development technologies my group utilized in order to complete the project.
What you see is not what you get with this class. You get much, much more, and I, personally, prefer it that way even if I have to teach myself many concepts in order to get things done.
What’s the most significant thing you learned?
Up until I took this class, web development was pretty fuzzy to me. This class taught me exactly what tools and technologies were needed for each component of a web application. I can explain in detail how each functionality of our website was coded, how the tests were written, and why things work the way they do. I think that’s pretty cool!
How many hours a week did you spend coding/debugging/testing for this class?
I spent about 10–15 hours coding/debugging/testing for this class on average each week. The time spent certainly depends on the role you have on the team. I started off just doing backend stuff, but I quickly realized I wanted frontend experience as well and began to spend more time learning frontend tools. That’s why my weekly average for hours spent began to climb after Phase 2.
How many hours a week did you spend reading/studying for this class?
I spent roughly 1 ½ hours reading/studying for this class each week. During exam weeks, it was closer to 10–15 hours. I spent about 10–15 minutes reviewing after each lecture and spent about 30–45 minutes on the weekly readings.
How many lines of code do you think you wrote?
I wrote about 800–1000 lines of code.
What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?
Postman. By working with Postman, I learned how to design, create, and test APIs.
What’s the most useful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?
We used Microsoft Azure’s Image Search API to find relevant images for all of our instance pages. I did not personally use this, as one of my other teammates took on the image-finding task, but it was a very important component of our project.
How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?
It was a valuable experience to self-teach so many technologies. It was definitely overwhelming, confusing, and chaotic at first since none of us seemed to know exactly what to do or where to start. Once we broke things down into smaller components and each took on the responsibility of learning specific technologies, things started coming together piece by piece.
How did you feel about the two-stage quizzes and tests?
I think they were great. It really encouraged collaboration and actually getting to know your peers in the class which often doesn’t happen outside the lab for CS students. It also allowed us to learn from and fix our mistakes the second time around.
For the quizzes, having to go back and revisit the questions and then also going over them as a class made the concepts stick better because at this point we were seeing the material three times in a row.
How did you feel about the cold calling, in the end?
I think cold calling is fantastic! I was nervous at the beginning of the semester, as was pretty much everyone else, but then I realized it didn’t matter if I was right or wrong. I just wanted to learn things correctly.
This is how I see it. If you get it right, great! If you get it wrong, even better! You got the gift of learning something you didn’t know or forgot about, and now, you’ll remember it.
A special note for future SWE students:
This has been my favorite CS course so far. (No, I’m not just saying that because this is a blog post for this class. I promise.) Professor Downing is a fantastic lecturer and really goes out of his way to help you learn and understand the material. Additionally, the sheer amount of knowledge you gain over the course of a semester is incredible. If you stay gritty and keep trying, regardless of how many times you fall or mess up or shake your head in confusion, you’ll get a lot out of this class. Through this class, you’ll learn to be a strong software engineer, dedicated teammate, and effective project manager. If you’re unfamiliar with the technologies required for this course like I was, this class will be time-consuming, so be prepared for that. However, it is, without a shadow of a doubt, worth it, and your UTCS journey would be incomplete without having taken SWE with Professor Downing!
Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your semester! :)
Best,
Chinmayee
