CS371p Fall 2021: Blake Romero: Final Entry

How well do you think the course conveyed the main takeaways?
I think that this course did a great job of introducing and consistently reinforcing these takeaways throughout the semester. I was able to get a great feeling of the importance of testing both during class and while working on the projects.

Were there any other particular takeaways for you?
While doing the assignments, I also saw the importance of planning out your code before actually writing it. It really helped out a lot in the later projects when we needed to have multiple classes interacting with each other.

How did you feel about cold calling?
I took SWE last semester, so I was already pretty used to the cold calling. Professor Downing is very welcoming throughout it, and he tries to make sure you are as comfortable as possible. It always feels like more of a learning experience rather than a sort of test.

How did you feel about specifications grading?
I would honestly have preferred a more typical grading system, but I think this system was fine overall. It did accomplish its main goal of keeping me and a couple of other people I know on top of each category, and I feel like the grade I ended up with is pretty representative of how well I did in the class.

How did you feel about help sessions and office hours?
I personally didn’t end up going to the help sessions or the office hours, but from what I heard from others, they were very helpful for completing the projects.

How did you feel about the support from the TAs?
The TAs in the course were very helpful whenever either myself or others I know needed help with something or needed to ask a question.

What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?
I didn’t have much experience with Gitlab CI/CD before this, so I am glad I was able to get more practice with that and a testing suite as well.

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?
After reading through these papers, the concept of isolation between different components of code was clearly very important. Ensuring that some change to one piece of code won’t severely impact the rest of your code is imperative to good design.

You should have read two papers that advised minimizing getters and setters. What insights have they given you?
After reading through these papers, it was pretty clear that getters and setters were not as necessary, or even as beneficial, as we were previously taught in beginning computer science classes. In order to maintain good design, it is much preferred to pass the work to those who have the information, rather than getting the information from them.