CS371P Fall 2019: Final Entry

· What did you like the least about the class?

I didn’t enjoy the experience of the first exam at all. It was late in the night, and we didn’t know the format until 10 minutes beforehand. Having Professor Downing give us an “experimental” format exam without informing us at all beforehand was pretty discouraging. The half-solo/half-collaborative work on the same questions, with each portion being weighed the same was heavily stressful and didn’t allow me enough time to actually answer all the questions. Similarly, as it was done on HackerRank, there were no useful IDE features such as autocomplete or useful compiler errors. You simply didn’t know exactly what was wrong, and especially didn’t have the time to figure it out, even for simple syntax errors.

· What did you like the most about the class?

I actually did enjoy the daily quizzes. Having to know the material from the previous class enough to utilize it effectively kept me paying attention to each of the lectures. However, there were several quizzes that felt like there were too many questions crammed into the limited time. I did appreciate the shift in the second half of the semester

· What’s the most significant thing you learned?

The most significant thing was probably CI/CD on GitLab and Google Test. The testing frameworks were really nice to pinpoint issues, but I didn’t previously know about them.

· How many hours a week did you spend coding/debugging/testing for this class?

I tended to do my projects within a few days to one week, but I’d probably average it out to 3–4 hours a week.

· How many hours a week did you spend reading/studying for this class?

0 hours a week.

· How many lines of code do you think you wrote?

Overall, probably 1500. There was refactoring and other things happening, but the end was probably 1500 or less LoC.

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

GitLab was really useful with CI/CD. I also set up the ubuntu subsystem in windows over the course of this class, and that’s made developing pretty nice on Windows. PuTTY tends to disconnect from the utexas network fairly often, and using SSH through an actual terminal doesn’t face the same issues.

· How did you feel about the cold calling, in the end?

Overall it was alright, but it felt like most of the people who got called never really got a chance to speak.

· If you could change one thing about the course, what would it be?

The test format.