CS373 Spring 2022: Audie Bethea: Final Entry
- How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways? Were there any other particular takeaways for you? How did you feel about cold calling?
I felt that the course went over most of the takeaways that were mentioned on the syllabus/lectures. Although I don’t really think that the lectures always covered the most relevant material, I think its fair to say that they did a good job of explaining their topics. I don’t mind cold calling, it wasn’t weird since it happened to everyone.
2. How did you feel about specifications grading? How did you feel about help sessions and office hours? How did you feel about the support from the TAs?
I wasn’t crazy about the specifications grading. However, I do believe that I received invaluable help from the TA’s in both office hours and over Discord/Canvas mail.
3. You should have read five papers that describe SOLID design: Single Responsibility, Open-Closed Principle, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, and Dependency Inversion. What insights have they given you? You should have read two papers that advised minimizing getters and setters. What insights have they given you?
I felt like I got to learn a lot about some different theories and strategies behind software development that I probably wouldn’t have learned as easily elsewhere. Although sometimes these papers were a little difficult to digest, I felt that they were mostly helpful. I especially enjoyed the getters/setters paper, as the topic felt a bit more familiar to me than SOLID.
4. What required tool did you not know and now find very useful? What’s the most helpful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required? How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies? In the end, how much did you learn relative to other UT CS classes?
I ended up finding Docker really helpful, I’d heard about it but never really used it before. Although it took some headache to get started with, it really ended up making our development process a lot smoother. For Web Dev tools, I found S3 to be super useful when storing PDFs/images for our site. I think my group handled the fast pace of the course well- it was part of what contributed to this being one of the most enriching courses I’ve taken in CS here at UT.
5. Give me your suggestions for improving the course, but apologies in advance; specifications grading will remain.
I would gear at least a few lectures towards the fundamental ideas behind web development (i.e. how backends/frontends/databases work together), because those are general ideas that I think all software engineers need to learn, regardless of what they want to end up doing.
