How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?

This course did a great job of conveying the key takeways. Notably I found the principles of leveraging being ‘lazy’ and collaboration to by my biggest takeaways. The lectures, exercises, papers, and projects to an extent all echoed these principles.

Were there any other particular takeaways for you?

A big takeaway from this class for me was seeing the interdisciplinary impact of computer science through our IDBs being used to spread awareness for marginalized communities or causes. Another takeaway was from the ethics classes and paper about being a woman in color in CS. I learned more about the moral dilemmas computer scientists face and how to make the correct decision while having a profitable business.

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

I’d never used Gitlab issues till now. I’m glad we used to track our IDB issues. It kept us accountable by closing them and also made getting our user stories very easy. I’ll definitly be used git issues for both solo and group projects in the future.

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

We used the AWS suite for a lot of components in our project. Notably we used Amplify and RDS. We also used D3 for visualizations for IDB phase 4 which was extremely helpful. We were able to generate maps, pie charts, and bar graphs with proper aesthetics and labeling.

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

Honestly I came into this class knowing that the classwork does not align with the project work so I wasn’t as shocked as others may have been. I think because I had a self-learning mindset coming into SWE, I felt prepared to learn front end and back end. Ultimately, though, I wish the SQL portion was done a few weeks earlier to be of help during phase 2 and 3 — at the moment it was done closer to the end of phase 3. I will also say, I got lucky being in a group where I didn’t have to learn backend because my teammates handeled that portion. Something that would be really helpful is having a day where the instructor just lays out how to even build a web project of this scale (i.e. a walkthrough of setting up a react project, connecting to a backend, setting up database etc.).

In the end, how much did you learn relative to other UT CS classes?

I definitely learned a lot of APPLICABLE skills in this class and will be adding my group’s final project and pecha kucha to my resume and LinkedIn. This was my first semester taking UDEs, so it was really rewarding to have a final project that actually aligns with my industry interests of full stack web development. I also picked up a new language to me (Python) and was able to reinforce my SQL knowledge.

Reflections on 5 other components of this class:

Specifications grading

I’ve taken competitive programming with Downing before, so I’ve already encountered specifications grading. This class did a WAY better job at it than OS does. The grade buckets were fair and there were plenty of oppruntities to make-up a grade (2 3s = 1). The category I was most scared of was the quizzes, and while many of them were really hard, the makeup policy was forgiving.

Cold calling

I don’t love it, but I do think it’s an effective teaching method to make students engaged and keep us on our toes throughout the lecture. It also made skipping class close to impossible LOL.

Quizzes sometimes being repeated to give you a second chance

I appreciated this a LOT. It seemed fair to repeat a quiz, especially when the average from the previous class was consistently below a 50%.

Weekly blog entries

They really weren’t that bad. On average I was spending about 20 mins per blog entry and it was pretty fun to read about other people’s weeks as well. Honestly if this is all I had to do for a writing flag in a CS class, I’ll take it.

CATME peer reviews

I liked these. It kept everyone on the same page and held us accountable in case there were any issues. It also gave me a chance to semi-anonymously let a group member know if I was upset about something. My group worked well together throughout but some feedback I recieved was to try and learn a bit of backend as well!

What did you do this past week?

I worked on adding the visualizations tabs to the navbar and to the hotlinks on the splash page. I also refactored and cleaned up code on the splash, about, and component pages. I’ve also been working on user stories.

What’s in your way?

I need to finish my slides for the pecha kucha. I’m working on the intro section where I’ll introduce the issue of substance abuse.

What will you do next week?

Next week I plan on doing a couple practice runs with my group before we present our pecha kucha. We’ll also finish up our technical report and finishing touches on the website.

What did you think of Paper #13. What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You.

This has been my favorite paper so far. It was very relatable as a woman of color. I’ve already encountered some sexist and racist experiences in the professional world, and this paper opened my eyes to other issues I’ll likely face like salary negotiations and judgement for starting a family along with having a career.

What did you think of of refactoring and the ethics lectures?

I really enjoyed the ethics lectures. I plan on taking ethics next semester so this was a good taste for that class. I enjoyed discussing the moral issues in CS. I also liked the refactoring exercise — honestly I thought it was the easiest exercise so far.

What made you happy this week?

I’m on my way to Dallas right now to watch DDN legends. I’m really excited as our team came really close to qualifying this year, but now we get to sit back and relax and watch the other teams and make our critiques. I also got to stay at an AirBnB with my friends after the show which was a lot of fun.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

I’ve been saving this tip for one of the last blogs. You can find the latest tech news on Verge. https://www.theverge.com/

What did you do this past week?

We worked on our resubmission for IDB phase 3. We had to add a filter category to our substances model page, add unit tests, and fix our pipeline. We will probably submit it today. We also met to plan out phase 4.

What’s in your way?

I need to help write user stories and will be in charge of implementing user stories. I also need to work on responsiveness in the mobile view for our treatment centers model page. The frontend team also has to add a visualizations page to our website and clean up the code. We’ll help back end with the visualizations if needed.

What will you do next week?

We’ll get the phase 4 rubric points done and finish our pecha kucha. We’ll also do a few practice presentation runs.

What did you think of Paper #12: Why extends is evil

I found paper #12 pretty interesting. I think it’s a bit weird how core programming principles we’re taught in high school are eventually labeled ‘bad programming practices.’ I did enjoy the examples though, it makes sense to use interfaces to avoid the fragile base-class issue.

What did you think of of SQL joins, SQL subqueries and refactoring?

I liked exercises 11 and 12. Writing subqueries made sense with the practice queries and I learned some important structural elements. I also liked the lecture on refactoring, it felt pretty intuitive. It was rewarding for the last exercise to be Java based as that is the language I’m most comfortable in. I also was happy to understand the natural join and cross join quiz this week!

What made you happy this week?

I started dancing again (I’m on Texas Mohini) and we’re prepping for UT Taal. It’s been pretty fun learning choreo and being put into the set. I got to visit the dining hall for a meal this week — I shouldn’t be as happy as I am, but it felt like a luxury. I also hung out with my friends a couple times this week which was fun.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

If you need a color scheme or hex codes that will complement your website’s theme, use https://coolors.co/.

What did you do this past week?

We mainly grinded on IDB phase 3. I worked on the responsiveness of the filters and search results display. I also had to standardize the phone screen responsiveness of the model pages. We also worked on the technical report and unit tests as a group.

What’s in your way?

We first need to get the search function from IDB phase 3 working perfectly. There are some combination of filters athat when put together display no results leading to a website crash. We also have some frontend functionality to work on based on our TA’s feedback.

What will you do next week?

We are currently working on getting IDB phase 3 resubmitted and then we’ll work on touchups on our website. We’ll also try and get our pecha-kucha done asap so we’re not too worried during finals week.

What did you think of Paper #11: More on getters and setters.

I found paper #11 a bit repetitive as it had many of the same subjects as paper 10. I liked the examples in this paper as they helped me understand alternatives for getters and setters. I honestly am craving a bit of a lighter read on the next paper.

What did you think of of SQL select, SQL subqueries, and SQL joins?

I really liked this week’s quizzes and exercise. The different clauses we learned with the select statements made sense and the exercise helped me reinforce some of the selects. The only thing I’m a bit confused about are subqueries, but I’ll read up on those notes.

What made you happy this week?

I went to Barton with my friends randomly in the middle of the week. The spontaneity was really fun and the weather was perfect. I’ve decided to say “yes” to more things in this last month of school!

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

The E-bike company Lime, is set to release 30,000 more scooters and bikes this year. They experienced record revenues and have driven most of their competitors out. They are being dubbed the Uber of scooters/bikes.

Read more.

What did you do this past week?

I worked on implementing our user stories as they were primarily all frontend. I also tested the app a lot on different screen sizes to see and fix visual bugs. I’ve researched a lot into how to implement a google like search — even though I’m not on backend, I still want to know how searching and filtering would be implemented.

What’s in your way?

We need to finish user stories and work on our filters. We also need to figure out how to add pagination to the instance linking sections and search pages.

What will you do next week?

This weekend the goal is to finish pagination and user stories. We’ll also do refinement next week because that’s what most of phase 4 is.

What did you think of Paper #10: Why getter and setter methods are evil

I remember being taught to use getters and setters for the purpose of having a way to manipulate private variables from a different class, however this article shows how a getter and setter actually violates the purpose of not just making the variable public. I liked learning about CRCs as well. I think I used a CRC once in an online OOP course. However, for the most part I’ve made design docs for UT classes. I do sometimes draw out informal CRCs though when working on personal projects — they help me visualize what data and functions go into which classes and how the classes are connected.

What did you think of of cross join, theta join, and natural join?

I actually really enjoyed these lessons. I know SQL so this intuitively made sense to me. The cross join exercise was sort of insane — I don’t know anyone that got the class implementation correct. But, natural join made a lot more sense. I also found the quizzes relatively easier.

What made you happy this week?

I’m writing this on Wednesday. Honestly I woke up today morning praying class would be online and then I saw the email saying class was on zoom — yay! My sister is visiting Austin for her spring break, I’m really excited to show her around and meet my friends.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

For the first time I’m doing something non software related, but hey it has to do with hardware (yay ECE!) For the second year in a row, vinyl record sales have outperformed CD sales. I find this to be proof of vintage trend comebacks and the fact that old things like bootcut jeans and digital cameras will always be revived every few years/decades.

Read more.

What did you do this past week?

This week we met to discuss IDB phase 3 and import issues into our gitlab. We split up frontend and backend tasks. Frontend is working on creating search bars and we will also do sorting. Backend is working on the actual search functionality and we suspect that’ll translate over to filters as well. I personally created the search bar for the splash page and worked on some more responsiveness. I also wrote the user stories for our developer team this week.

What’s in your way?

We need to get search working. Even though I’m not on backend, I want to try and involve myself in the SQL portion more to understand how the filters and sort by would work. I’m also really interested in the google like search so I need to get my backend environment setup locally so I can help with that.

What will you do next week?

Next week we’ll hopefully finish IDB 3 ahead of time and be done by Friday. We’ll work on some tests and also finish technical report. We also need to finish user stories.

What did you think of Paper #9: The Dependency Inversion Principle

I really liked how this paper defined a solid 3 principles to measure my program design against. I’ve often experienced peers or TAs saying “that’s not the way I would’ve done it” rather than evaluating my design on concrete parameters of rigidity, fragility, and immobility. A bad habit I’ve engaged in has been creating bandaid fixes / hacks or hardcoding certain parts of my CS assignments to pass a test. Although it gets the job done and isn’t technically wrong, I can see how that would increase the fragility of my program and cause issues down the road, equating to bad design.

What did you think of instance methods, static methods, class methods, select, and project?

The discussion on static and class methods was informative — it made sense how some of the tests were misleading even though they technically worked. I’m happy we started relational algebra this week. I’ve been told the SQL lectures in this class are some of the best, so I’m pretty excited. I also actually understand SQL as opposed to not really knowing Python so hopefully quizzes are a little easier for me now.

What made you happy this week?

I got to see my friends and have movie night. I also had a welcome dinner for my internship which was fancy and paid for 😋 . I’ve been pretty productive this week (finished an ADV midterm too) so that was nice.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

I’m assuming multiple people are going to talk about this week, but U.S. sued Apple 😮. Department of Justice claimed that Apple maintained an illegal monopoly over the smartphone market by locking in customers and making experiences worse for rival products. To be honest, all their arguments to me just sound like smart product marketing and innovation by Apple. Ex. “suppressing the quality of messaging between the iPhone and competing platforms like Android” or “limiting the functionality of third-party smartwatches with its iPhones and making it harder for Apple Watch users to switch from the iPhone due to compatibility issues”… I mean ok?

Read more.

What did you do this past week?

We grinded on IDB phase 2. I was on frontend for this phase so I worked a lot on testing the site’s responsiveness. I was also in charge of integrating the user stories as they were mainly front end stories. I also helped write the technical report.

What’s in your way?

Before I leave for break, our group needs to turn in IDB phase 2. We have some unit tests still left and have to get two out of our other three model/instance pages connected to the backend. Once backend is done, I can test for responsiveness.

What will you do next week?

Rest!!! I’ll also probably take a look at IDB phase 3 with my group to have a bit of a head start before break ends. I also want to read through some of our backend implementation and ask questions about it to try and contribute to backend in the next phase.

What did you think of Paper #8: The Interface Segregation Principle

I had two many takeaways from the ISP paper.

1. You can conform to ISP by introducing Adapter/middleman classes. When a class needs to be made more specific (i.e. Door → TimedDoor), rather than modifying the abstract class directly and increasing its specificity, we should introduce a middleman concrete class to bridge the gap.
2. We can also multiple inheritance to implement ISP. Something to note is that when inheriting multiple interfaces (at least in Java), they must be exactly that — interfaces, not classes, since a class can only extend 1 abstract class.

What did you think of cache, functions, and regexps??

Once again, this class and the unique intricacies of Python continue to confuse me — but the parts I understand (the couple takeaways each week I find I might actually apply while coding) are very satisfying. This week’s exercise helped me understand the two ways to use decorator functions which was a good learning experience. The Monday quiz definitely tripped me up though, but the redo helped me reinforce those concepts.

What made you happy this week?

My boyfriend visited for his spring break and we got to spend a lot of time together and eat some great food this week. I also get to go home so I’m really excited about that.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

GE Appliances is working on using Cookcam AI to identify what food a user places in the oven through image recognition and then automatically adjust cook settings and cook time by the type of food and temperature. Currently this technology only works with 5 food items: turkey, cookies, pizza, cakes, and brownies, and its greatest competitor is Samsung who has already added AI Pro Cooking to its Bespoke wall oven, which also uses a camera and optimizes cooking settings while monitoring food. The Samsung oven can detect over 80 kinds of foods. GE has the advantage though that the AI update will be added to their existing ovens, versus with Samsung you must buy a brand new one.

Read more here.

What did you do this past week?

What’s in your way?

What will you do next week?

What did you think of Paper #8: __?

What did you think of __?

What made you happy this week?

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

What did you do this past week?

I worked on the responsiveness of our IDB site. I implemented the navbar resizing function and worked on standardizing the website’s CSS (colors, cards, divs). I also worked on the responsiveness of our instance pages and connecting the databse to our frontend with the API.

What’s in your way?

We need to finish the rest of IDB 2 before Wednesday. We still have 2 out of 3 model pages and their instances to fix formatting on and pull from the backend for. We also have to finish implementing all the user stories.

What will you do next week?

We will primarily work on checkpoint 2 + we might take 2 slip days. We mainly need to get the backend done before we can do all the frontend. Additionally, I have several other group projects that are due next week before Spring Break so I’m pretty stressed about that.

What did you think of Paper #7: The Liskov Substitution Principle?

I found this paper to be an interesting continuation of the open-close principle. To summarize in my words, LSP states that objects of a superclass should be replaceable with objects of its subclasses without breaking the application. I liked all the examples shown in the paper; I particularly liked the subtle example of breaking LSP since I think subtle errors are a lot more common in real code and are most frustrating to debug. The Rectangle and Square class example made it easy to see the downfalls of the Square class inheriting some of Rectangle’s methods and instance variables.

What did you think of of comprehensions, closures, and decorators?

I honestly found it pretty confusing and some of the most complex concepts so far. Especially the discussion on decorators today will take some digesting. I did get the three main steps to implementing a decorator due to repetition in class. This week’s quizzes were pretty helpful in reinforcing my understanding of lazy generators vs. an actual list.

What made you happy this week?

I had a retreat this weekend and got to see a lot of old friends again. I helped organize retreat so it was pretty exciting to see my ideas come to life in terms of merch, food, and activities. The highlight of my weekend was definitely the catered food and pulling an all nighter with the other attendees.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Samsung will be releasing the Galaxy Ring this year. This is a fitness tracker designed to be a sleeker alternative to a fitness tracking watch. Its direct competitor is the Oura Ring. I’m quite interested to see how Samsung develops the product’s aesthetics, since rings are jewelry that must look at home next to precious metals and possible wedding rings.

Read more here.

What did you do this past week?

Began working on IDB phase 2. I’m working on the front end — adding responsiveness to our site’s mobile view and working on making our navbar show up on a smaller screen size. I’ve been pretty swamped in general with my other classes as well and have had a lot of work for HCI and my entrepreneurship classes.

What’s in your way?

Our group took this week to focus on designing our API database rather than jumping straight into coding. We’re not behind, but we do want to ensure we start start tangibly coding now to not rush at the last minute. I also can’t really work after next Friday, so I want to make sure I finish my parts of the project before that.

What will you do next week?

Next week the plan is to complete all our front end changes and standardize our model and instance pages to look similar. I also need to work on some project deadlines for other classes.

What did you think of Paper #6: The Open-Closed Principle?

The second paper in this series of papers was very informative. My core takeaway was to use abstract classes with minimal specificity to allow extending it into multiple use cases. The paper contained an example of the open close principle where we see how modifying the Draw method for each shape instead of hardcoding individual shapes’ draw methods adheres to open-close principle. This way, the DrawAllShapes method doesn’t have to change and will work no matter how many shapes which extend the Shape class are added.

Another takeaway was that sometimes we are told programming rules that don’t really make sense. For example, I remember in some core CS classes there were style rules that I didn’t agree with but had to blindly follow for the sake of my grade.

What did you think of of my_range, yield, and Digits?

I found yield the most interesting topic from this week’s lectures. I’m not too familiar with Python but I have worked with iterators and implementing them with the next function before. Seeing how yield auto-generates an iterator and returns the yielded value was really interesting. The Digits exercise helped me reinforce my understanding of how to implement iterators in two ways.

What made you happy this week?

I got to see my team before they headed out for a comp in Minnesota this weekend. It hasn’t been too fun of a week, but I was pretty productive so I feel good about that.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Windows is getting its own magic eraser to AI modify images. This will directly compete with Google and Samsung’s similar in-built products. Article here.