Week One: Or Zero?

Hello, world! Welcome to my humble, little blog. Come grab a seat, make yourself comfortable, and join me on my adventures in Professor Downing’s Software Engineering class.

Let me begin by briefly recounting my journey to this class and my interest in computer science. And to avoid accidentally drafting up the initial chapters of my autobiography, I will insert a Devo-inspired Q&A in the section’s stead.

Q: Where did you grow up?

A: I’m from Austin, Texas — born and raised.

Q: What high school did you attend?

A: I went to Westlake High School, the same school that brought us Drew Brees, Nick Foles, and Sam Ehlinger. You might speculate that there must be something in the water, but my passing skill in football suggests otherwise.

Q: What was your favorite extracurricular activity in high school?

A: Hard to choose one favorite, though it’s probably FIRST robotics. During sophomore year of high school, my team spent two-plus hours working on our robot after school every day, and I was the lead designer for the critical intake subsystem. Our team, the Pi-Rho Maniacs, ended up placing #6 globally (out of ~10,000 teams) by non penalty OPR and #7 globally by qualification ranking. You can see for yourself on FTC Stats and Ctrl + F “Pi-Rho Maniacs”.

Q: Why did you come to UT?

A: I knew I was going to study CS in college (more on this later) and UT Austin was one of the top-ranking schools for this, and growing. The recent news about the NSF selecting us to lead the AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning is proof that Austin is emerging as the nation’s number one tech hub. Plus, I just love the city and its people. Hook ‘em!

Q: Why are you majoring in CS?

A: My fascination with CS began nearly a decade ago, when I watched IBM Watson trounce two of the world’s greatest trivia geniuses at their own game. I might not have grasped the intricacies of the machine at the time, but I fully understood then and there that I had to get involved with the technologies that were pushing the bounds of human capability and making this possible. Majoring in CS would be crucial step.

Q: Why are you in this class?

A: During freshman year of college, when I asked upperclassmen for a list of what they considered essential electives CS students ought to take, Professor Downing’s name and this class came up every single time. I know that the conditions of this semester aren’t optimal, but I still can’t wait to get hands-on experience with working in teams for a semester-long software engineering project.

I currently know enough web programming needed to create a static website and enough JavaScript to be frustrated with it. This is to say that if I were to work on front-end for the project this semester, I would learn a lot. I would also like to familiarize myself with Python, but with my expertise in many OOP languages, e.g. Java, C++, Swift, etc., I expect this to be an easier process than reaching the same level for the front-end stuff. On a related note, my biggest expectation with this class is to become proficient enough with applying these languages on a team-based project that I am comfortable with working on a full-stack project by myself.

The first two lectures have been fine content-wise, as it’s mostly been set-up stuff, i.e. Docker and basic Python, as one would expect for the first week of any college course. That being said, I’m already a big fan of the cold calling. It makes the class seem a lot more involved than any other online class I’ve taken so far. Even if I’m not the student being cold-called, the transformation of a lecture from didactic to quasi-dialectic is a constantly refreshing format. The student that is being cold-called brings his/her own knowledge to the table, which makes for an incomparably unique experience. I just hope I don’t embarrass myself though.

On a more personal note, I got to catch up with many of my friends this week in a socially distanced manner. I’m extremely thankful for the people I know, and the time that we spent together made me happy this week. Also, I got to see my younger brother leave home for university, which was unbelievably bittersweet.

My tip-of-the-week is the BuiltWith Technology Lookup, a website offering the function of generating lists of frameworks used by any queried website. By looking up medium.com, we can see that Medium uses Dynatrace, Parse.ly, Cloudflare Insights, and more for analytics and tracking. Try something like google.com or utexas.edu, and BuiltWith says that the domain is on their (extensive) misleading profile site list, which means that the various pages and subdomains make it difficult for their system “to accurately tell you what this site is built with.” So all in all, the website lookup is limited in a few aspects, but it absolutely has its uses.

Okay, that’s all for now, folks! Tune in next week for more shenanigans.

P.S. Yes, I am aware how extra this blog post is. No, I will not change my style unless if I’m super busy during the week… or I get bored of it. Cheers.