CST 338 Week 8

Week 8

Woo! It's the final week. I'm very happy to see it here. I did really enjoy this course, but I'm ready to move on to the next topic.

This week we had some flexibility (really, a ton!) with our final project and that was a bit difficult for me. I felt like I was too concerned about making a project that really stood out. In the end, I decided to go for simplicity and to get the project completed. I chose to implement a super simple command-line driven recipe book. The user can't write to it, but they can navigate between the pages. I think that's good enough for this time around.

Specific Prompts

They say hindsight is 20/20, what advice would you give to the next cohort regarding this course?

I have a few suggestions for the next cohort that takes this course:

1. The last assignment requires the use of an IntelliJ product called Android Studio. Begin using IntelliJ from the first day of class and this application will feel familiar.
2. As far as the actual studies go, begin each project early. The 4-hour estimates are way lower than the time that is actually required for each assignment.
3. Read each assignment over before/after you work on it for the day and make sure you follow the guidelines. Double check if methods are supposed to be private/public! You'll get some points marked off if it varies from the assignment description.

How much do you envision using the skills you gained in this course in your career?

This course covered a ton of material that's extremely useful in day-to-day programming. Granted, some of it's pretty Java-specific and many students may never come into contact with Java. Professionally, I've encountered many of the topics taught. I believe that knowing more of the design patterns would have also been useful and hope I'll get to see some more in future courses.