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).

Experience of Class so Far

I did the server setup (on AWS) for my SWE group, and it was very interesting to find how tedious it can be to setup a server properly. Thank god for internet tutorials. Another good thing to learn (or at least have reinforced) is that sometimes tutorials provided or found online are full of crap. I wasted at least six hours trying to follow the provided AWS tutorial, but it is both deprecated and full of small errors. The thing about server setup is that these small errors might only show up in the error log files as really cryptic messages, or they might not show up at all because its not an actual error that apache will realize is an error, but just an error in that your website might use the wrong config file or something. It becomes very important to actually understand what the tutorial is trying to do and not just do exactly what it says for this very reason, so you can recognize the mistakes in it and try to fix them yourself.

What is in my way

As usual time constraints make it difficult. It’s usually a compromise between the big three (sleep, social life, and school) where two of the three can be adequately satisfied. Currently school is absolutely destroying the other two. On the plus side, the lab is very distraction free from the hours of 12-7 AM.

What will you do next week

Security project and homework, Advanced Architecture project and test, SWE project, Multicore project, 439 test (to TA for and run the test review). Quite the hell-week.

Tips and Miscellaneous Advice/Drivel

There is this cool app called Postman that lets you simulate api calls to any website. This is very very useful if you want to see exactly what kind of JSON a website (such as yours or one you are using to get data) returns. I learned about it during an internship, so I would also recommend it for the reason that it is used in the industry currently. Also, for next year, I included an extremely (maybe even overly) pedantic writup on the server side setup which may be useful for future studends. There are no steps (I think) left out. So at least for this project you won’t have to hack together several tutorials provided/online.