Wednesday, December 14, 2016

CST 438 Week 8

Week 8

I don't know why, but this entire course I've felt very behind. Like, I'm just barely turning assignments in on time. I'm either getting a little burnt out or there's more work in this class than there has been in previous classes. I'm really glad it's the last week and I've spent all of my spare time this week working on the final paper. My company has a holiday party on the last day to turn in our assignments (Friday), so I'm feeling even shorter on time for this last assignment and am really pushing to get it turned in a day early (Thursday). I was hoping to get to work on the group project, but the amount of detail (and diagrams) required for the paper has made that no longer an option.

There were a couple of diagrams for the final paper that I ended up creating hypothetically since my group didn't get far enough to complete them, like the E-R diagram. Even with understanding some of them, I still spent a lot of time working on understanding each of them and how they're supposed to look. Hopefully, that works out in my favor. As of writing this, I'm about done with the paper. The paper is written and my diagrams are complete, but the paper itself still feels a bit choppy and is too long. I believe it's because there were so many questions to answer. Attempting to piece them together and make the paper flow well has been difficult, but I'm practically done. (woo!)

Looking forward to the short break after my final in my other course, Computer Architecture, until Design and Analysis of Algorithms begins.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

CST 438 Week 7

Week 7

The final exam (or assignment) was my primary focus for this week. It was a bit challenging and required some set up because the first two questions had their own programs to import into an IDE and run. However, I think I did okay and will spend the rest of my time focusing on the final paper (due module 8). If I have additional time, I'll contribute to my group project some more.

There were a lot of topics covered in this course. I was familiar with some and not so much with others. Personally, I learned a lot about different diagrams. I already had experience with database schema UML diagrams and class diagrams. However, sequence diagrams and deployment diagrams were very new for me. I really enjoyed learning how to do those.

Because I work in the tech industry, I was already familiar with some of the development patterns (Model-View-Controller mainly), the different workflows covered (Waterfall and Agile), and testing. This is how I know that these are practices already used in the real world and they're worth paying attention to.

I look forward to wrapping up the final pieces of this course and moving on to Design and Analysis of Algorithms!

Monday, December 5, 2016

CST 438 Week 6

Week 6

The assignment this week covered Gantt charts and team velocity (in an Agile workflow). The Gantt charts are pretty straightforward and show what's called a waterfall development process. It's exceptionally planned and relies heavily on the participants getting their work done in an expected time frame. We used a program called GanttProject to chart a hypothetical project. I found it useful and fun to plan out this fake project.

We also created a draft report (that will turn into our final report the last week of class). This was exceptionally difficult for me to complete because it was so heavily based on how my group worked together on our group project that we're currently working on and what we've built. My team has not been very team-like and we haven't had a chance to review any code for each other. Additionally, nothing is really built out yet and we're still looking at a bare bones application. I started two applications a few weeks ago (one for the server and one for the client) that still need to be filled in. However, this weekend I did get both of these applications running on AWS instances through Bitnami. That took a long time, mostly because I didn't know that I had to wait a half day for the servers to be created through AWS.

I believe that everyone is struggling to complete the normal course work and contribute to the team project at the same time. There are people behind in work that are still trying to get caught up on old weeks. Because the group project doesn't have any direct point value on our grade, I believe it's put off until last and results in students not contributing to the group project. I understand why it has the least priority for my classmates and I don't blame them for putting it off.