CS373 Fall 2021: Justin Foster - Final Entry

My experience with this class has been mostly positive. There have been some instances where I have had frustrations with the class but after the general learning curve of the class, it was generally self-explanatory on how to do well.

Grading Scale

The EMRN scale is a little convoluted especially with the virtual tokens but if you find the trick to doing well on the quizzes, it becomes much easier to do well in the class.

Long Term Take Aways

Be super communicative with your team and learn around your team more than learning around the project. It’s very helpful to discover your team’s greatest strength’s because it will help you complete the project more seamlessly. Make sure you are constantly testing your code which is super helpful when using React Bootstrap. As long as you are able to compile your code before pushing to the repo, your website should deploy easily without any problems. This brings us to the very important point: test, test, test. Make sure you are not the one bringing your website down, make sure you’re only contributing good code to your project. One of the most important tools we used for our project is to use AntD design. They are very simple and allowed us to make a very good-looking project with things like cards, carousels, buttons, and much more.

• How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?

  • I think these takeaways were very well conveyed.

• How did you feel about cold calling?

  • Cold calling was not too bad. After you get called on the first few times, it becomes easier when talking to Professor Downing.

• How did you feel about specifications grading?

• How did you feel about help sessions and office hours?

  • Help sessions and office hours were very important especially for earlier projects. These gave us the ability to check in our projects and make sure they were good before submission and get last minute help.

• How did you feel about the support from the TAs?

  • I thought the TA’s were very helpful and being able to have the discord to talk to them was majorly useful. Being only one @ away from getting help was awesome.

• What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?

  • Docker is very interesting and very useful. Being able to have a system to make sure that the system you are running on has all the necessary dependencies. As a developer who has used systems that aren’t standardized, it’s very annoying to get your system up to standard.

• What’s the most helpful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?

  • The most helpful web-dev tool was AntD Design that gave us many of the important tools we would need to make our website look good. These tools made designing the site super easy and doable.

• How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?

  • It was a little intimidating but after working through many of them, it was super rewarding and helpful. From being nervous about finishing to being fully able to do it, it was super rewarding.

• Give me your suggestions for improving the course:

  • I think this course is designed well to complete its purpose. However, I think the quiz system with the 3-minute quiz in the 4-minute window is also convoluted.