CS373 — Roman Kuhn — Final Entry

What did you like the least about the class?

I think what I liked the least about this class was that I already knew python very well so the majority of the lectures were very boring to me, yet I was required to attend. I honestly felt like the lectures could have been instead been about either software engineering technologies and tools and teaching the proper way to do so.

What did you like the most about the class?

I want to be a software engineer and I feel like this class is the most useful CS class I’ve taken at UT. I think the project based learning is amazing and the amount of work for this class is just perfect. I really enjoyed having a team to work with. People in my group didn’t always do a fair share of work but I found that more of a challenge than an obstacle. It was super valuable learning how to communicate properly when I felt like people in the team needed to step up or take on more responsibility. Also, as frustrating as the self-learning can be at times, it was honestly an invaluable part of the class. The SQL taught was also pretty useful.

What’s the most significant thing you learned?

The most significant thing I learned in this class was definitely JavaScript and react. I wish I got to have more experience with AWS but I just didn’t end up working on that side of the project. Besides that communication with team members and managing a team and project was super valuable.

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

Probably less than 10? I’m really bad at estimating time but honestly it never felt like I was working on these projects a ton. The coding was pretty simple once you figured it out.

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

Probably 10 minutes a week. I didn’t study much for the class, it wasn’t quite necessary.

How many lines of code do you think you wrote?

Probably around 10,000? Maybe less?

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

I didn’t know anything about CI pipelines before this class and although I didn’t actually get much out of them for this project, they are totally used in industry so it’s good to have the knowledge that they exist and how they work.

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

I don’t have a great example for this but we used the Google Maps React web dev tool and although I probably won’t use it again, it was useful to learn about how different tools work.

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

It was frustrating. I think self-teaching is super useful, but so much of the documentations and tutorials for many of these tools were awful. There needs to be like an actually good course about how to program in react. There are literally so few software engineering courses at UT what the heck.

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

I liked them. I thought the quizzes weren’t too hard and the tests were pretty easy. It’s pretty low stress because if you miss a few you can laugh about it when you discuss the answers with your friends.

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

I didn’t like the cold calling. Overall it kept me paying attention a little bit, and I did fine every time I was called, but it just felt stressful in the beginning for quite some time. I’m not sure how you encourage people pay attention without it but I’m sure there’s a way.