CS373 Fall 2018: Benjamin Chen

1. What did you do this past week?
The school semester started ramping up and I organized my calendar, marked important dates and tests, and purchased my textbooks. Looking back, buying them at a more opportune time instead of last minute would have afforded my wallet a little extra thickness.
In class, we introduced ourselves and I’m glad to see a few familiar faces.
2. What’s in your way?
I still need to find the online versions of the rest of the textbooks, paid for, of course. I also still need to find a group to work on the projects with. I think I need to mark down the estimated workloads of the projects on my calendar — that will help me manage my time. I can consult my friends who have already taken this class.
3. What will you do next week?
Next week, my textbooks will arrive and I will start reading the first few chapters. I also need to start familiarizing myself with the tools laid out in the syllabus.
4. What are your expectations of the class? (this question will vary, week to week)
I expect this class to challenge my resourcefulness. In other words, the material presented in class is more like a mental framework in approaching overall software engineering. The actual implementation varies on a project by project basis. I expect to often be researching and justifying the use of a library or toolset. Moreover, the work spent in this class will be more on the holistic design and higher-level implementation rather than coding line by line — I mean there’s no need to rewrite open source code.
5. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
AWS CodePipeline is a pretty cool contiguous integration feature. Last class talking about Travis-CI reminded me of this tool. We host a project on Github. Just before code pipeline, our developers and myself included spent time building the project, changing API keys, and then manually deploying. There was a lot of time wasted, and a lot to keep track of. With this tool, we simply deploy to Github, and a webhook there listens for it. AWS handles the rest, from changing environment variables to loading the appropriate config files. It saved a lot of headache and time.
