Class Overview

Overall this class was worth taking. I would highly recommend taking at least one Downing class before graduating UTCS mainly because of all the tools you learn that you wouldn’t in any other class; they boost your resume quite a bit (I think). Things like knowing continuous delivery frameworks like Travis CI, and about containerization tools like Docker, can make your resume stand out from others. That being said, Downing is an excellent and enjoyable teacher so it’s not like actually going to class is a giant downer or anything. Downing’s Software engineering is certainly more challenging than his OOP class, but only if you have bad partners for the final project is it much much more challenging; I had great partners, so it was only slightly more challenging than OOP. The tests in SWE were much more challenging than those in OOP, but I think this was because he changed his test format from coding to multiple choice, and I do better on the former. If you do better on the latter then it will be fine.

Past Week

Presentations in SWE. I think ours went well, and I loved the one of the team that went after us (one on art, I forget the name), but the website was designed beautifully.

Past Week

Went over the adapter pattern and the fact that if a child overrides a method in the parent they can have a different return type, provided the relationship between the two return types (the child’s and parents) is the same type of relationship as that of the parent and child in SWE. Learned about Islamic art in art history which was pretty cool. Went hiking several times.

Past Week

Implemented message passing between cores in multicore, learned about the strategy pattern in SWE, implemented AES-256 in security, learned about Middle Eastern art in art history, and wrote a 4bit alu for advanced architecture.

Past Week

Wrote a simulator for Advanced Architecture (Y-86 ring any bells?), moved, and finished the SWE project. In class we went over some more advanced SQL techniques.

Past Week

Mainly spent it writing an assembler for CS 350c. In class we went over more sql stuff and also some html precursor things.

Past Week

Jumped right into the SWE project and spent about ten hours on that (not bad), but mainly spent my time on Multicore, Advanced Architectuer, and 439 interviews (which were actually very fun).

Past Week

Went out every other day, which I think is a great spring break schedule because your body isn’t destroyed. And every other day I worked on barrelfish. In Class two weeks ago we talked about the new projects and the requirements in that.

Past Week

Had SWE test and Advanced Architecture project due. Got together a group for SWE presentation. Went out for Mardi Gras.

Past Week

Worked on multicore all day, the all night, then all day, then all night. And then we didn’t finish. Grading the 439 tests for hours was also a joy. Also I wrote my first alias because I am a pro #hacker and not because I was too lazy to ever do it before.

Past Week

Worked on several projects due this week. Learned about comprehensions and closures in SWE. Turned in Netflix. Homemade chinese food on Valentines day instead of the career fair.

Past Week

Started Netflix project with my partner and we got most of it done in an hour. Went over some cool Python qualities like how it caches small primitive types, also went over some exception handling procedure.

Past Week

Went over the fact that Python likes to use try catches. Went over Collatz solutions some more. Went over the different types of data structures that are provided by the java framework.

Past Week

Went over white- and black-box testing. Learned about the read eval print loop (REPL) learned that although Java has overloading, Python does NOT. We then learned about makefiles, coverage, range in python, ways functions can communicate, that ctrl-d signals EOF to standar in. Lastly we learned that in Python, when you assign to a var it will assume it is local without the “global” keyword.

Past Week

The first week of classes. Luckily, managed to be adequately productive. We went over mostly syllabus stuff in classes but we learned some about a Python Testing framework in Software Engineering.

Past Week

OOP final, Mobile Computing final app due, grading for OS, Brit. Lit Final. Everything but sleep.

Past Week

Finished turning in the last project in OOP, now to study for the final that supposedly everyone fails. Learned more about virtual functions, why one would want to use them, and more of their intracacies.

Past Week

Finishing Life as we speak, so many tests, so little time. Also starting to grade VM for Operating Systems and some drunk lady rear-ending me. Pretty fun week.

Past Week

Learned about the new Life project, finished Darwin project, signed with Microsoft.

Past Week

Worked on projects off and on. Learned about swap which seems pretty cool.

Past Week

Learned about Darwin Project. It seems fine, honestly it seems pretty easy, which is nice because we ain’t got time for this right now. Also, definitely 312 rehash minus classes so that’s fun. Also prepared for a Compilers test this week, jk I crammed for five hours right before the test.

Past Week

Learned about how sloppily initializing arrays of objects by not using an allocator can waste time because all objects in the array will call their default constructor. Have been in San Francisco and Seattle for interviews the rest of the week aka Thursday (oct 13) - Tuesday (oct 18). Exploring a city in a day is impossible so I’ve just been doing homework in coffeeshops/parks and eating food.

Past Week

Tests everywhere.

Past Week

This week we learned a lot more about constructors, that was very interesting/confusing.

Past Week

Finished up the Netfilx project. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the project was configuring paths, makefiles, setting compiler flags, and beating Travis CI into submission (I love you Travis CI). Three projects total and one test made for a challenging week, but made the weekend all the sweeter. Also a very very cool talk by a kind of literal rocket scientist in class and template functions.

Past Week

Had a speaker come in and talk about working at Bloomberg, which was very interesting. I think I saw him working on the sixth floor later that afternoon, which makes me wonder how many people on campus and especially in the GDC at any given time are non-students or faculty. Yet another reason to be glad for the more-lax dress code in the software industry; I can’t imagine the horror of resisting sweatpants for fear of a potential recruiter judging me from afar, were I, say, a pre-law or government student. Learned about the equality operator in class as well, c++ allowing developers to override basic operators (I forgot the technical term, sue me) such as ++ and == for types they have defined is extremely cool and fun to learn about.

Past Week

Frantically finished Collatz. Interestingly, the project itself took like an hour to finish, but checking that all of the specs were correct took ~5 hours and I’m still pretty sure that they are wrong. We did crazy pointer and address stuff in class that made my head hurt, but, surprisingly, looks super interesting.

Past Week

Learned a lot about c++ syntax and tips to make it run faster (++ in front because lvalue, rvalue differences necessitate copies in certain instances). Talked more thoroughly abou the first project due (Collatz), especially tips on how to optimize it. We also discussed how to use some of the tools in the class better. Downing made a nifty little checklist for us in class for the first project. We also talked about testing and how to do it properly (including such things on why not to use Asserts; long story short don’t shoot your lover, throw stuff at them instead).

Past Week

Learned some basic differences between CPP and Java, talked through the syllabus, looked into the extremely cool-looking gcov tool which tells how much of your code has actually been executed, and used aforementioned tool on some trivial coding examples.

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