Monday, November 28, 2016

CST 438 Week 5

Week 5

Thanksgiving zipped by this week. I had some time off and was able to spend some of the time working on assignments in addition to visiting my family. It was very needed and appreciated. I spent all of Wednesday trying to get the initial project set up for my team. A pull request was submitted for it, but my team has been very busy and didn't have the time to review it over the weekend. Once we get the initial project set up, I believe I can tear through a good portion of it. I'm looking forward to getting it done and getting through this course (we're getting so close!).

Outside of the group project, our assignments have been focused on code reviews and team participation. I believe this is very crucial and relevant to the real world. I appreciate the assignments on the subject.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

CST 438 Week 4

Week 4

This week was unexpectedly difficult due to me getting sick over the weekend. It took out a bunch of time that I would have used getting work done. Because I had a midterm in my other class on Monday (Computer Architecture), we didn't have any assignments. This significantly helped me get more done in this course over the weekend.

The assignments were pretty straight forward. We had a midterm but the questions all seemed reasonable. I still struggle with many of the diagrams. Hopefully I understand them enough to have done okay on the midterm.

Getting together and working with my team has been going okay. I feel like everyone is working very hard on their other assignments and haven't had the time available to put into our group project. I'm hoping, with the lighter workload next week, we will be able to get going quickly.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

CST 438 Week 3

Week 3

This week has been very challenging. I spent almost an entire day this weekend trying to get our project set up in Intellij. I really dislike working in Eclipse and have been able to successfully make all of our previous projects work with Intellij. This time was a bit different because Intellij was automatically generating the servlet files different than Eclipse. After switching to Eclipse again, things went pretty smooth. Hopefully I've completed the programming assignment as expected.

The other assignment that was on building domain models really confused me. I'm okay with UML class diagrams, which represent the class contents and their hierarchy, and the idea of sequence diagrams but these domain models are not structured enough for me to completely understand.

Physically I'm probably the most tired that I have been in the entire program. It's not necessarily related to this particular course but I think it's just being a bit burnt out with my academic and professional work load. With two out of town weddings in the past month and a midterm this week, I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving break. Lots of cooking and studying to do! I'm also looking forward to moving on to larger group projects. Working on large assignments tends to help me keep my head in the game.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

CST 438 Week 2

Week 2

This week and the weekend were exceptionally busy for me due to being a bridesmaid in my cousin's out of town wedding, making it difficult to complete my assignments. The assignments are a bit rushed, but it should be the last crazy week for me and this course (thank goodness!).

The topics this week included writing program requirements with UML diagrams and unit tests. This take on UML diagrams is new for me. I am very unfamiliar with them and I don't believe I have completely understood them correctly. However, I'm very familiar with unit tests. I've worked on several professional projects where I had to write them (ended up writing ~300 unit tests per project). They're tedious and can be exhausting to work out, but they really do help you catch mistakes.

I thought that my understanding of unit tests would help me breeze past the work this week, but it's been a lot more in depth and time consuming to work through. The system tests we got for our project were giving me errors, causing me to have an unexpectedly difficult time.