Weekly Blog Entry 2

So I just got done reading the two papers assigned for Tomorrow: Collegiate Happiness and College Advice. Pretty good advice and I just wanted to write down the few that I thought were most applicable to me.

Meeting the faculty, Studying in Groups, and getting involved in other clubs I think was the most important to me. Building rleationships with teachers is a pretty good thing because it helps cement a relationship with someone who could possibly be a great mentor and life long teacher. There are a few teachers to this day that I still email from freshmen year with questions.

Studying in Groups is a great way to learn the material. We all learn and think differently so when you sit in a group it is pretty good because you can talk about the material help each other answer questions and the more you talk about things the more it sticks in your head and the better you understand the material. Last semester in stat I use to do this with my study group a lot and I ended up making an A- in the class.

Getting involved in other clubs is pretty important to. When you constantly put yourself in a position with other similar aged people who have common interests you put yourself in a position to find life long friendship. For instance I joined the stock market club freshmen year and just constantly going to these clubs every meeting and sharing opinions and going to the social events I made friends that I still talk to to this day.

For the other paper College advice I found it interesting that programmers who have the best communication skills had the most power because they were able to communicate and gain leverage for their idea's the best. They were also taller but I really can't do much about that except wear my Nike Shoxx a lot haha.

Another interesting tip from Joel was taking Programming Intensive courses. He pointed out that most colleges dont offer software development. They offer computer science which IS NOT the same thing. You want to take CS courses that make you do a lot of programming because in doing a lot of programming you learn the skills better to develop software. Software engineering practices in CS classes are not frequent. That made me appricate the class that I am currently taking-software engineering with Professor Downing.

All in all both papers were pretty good and I took some precious gems from them. I am off now to continue working on the assignments.

Weekly Blog Entry 1

So I registered for Software Engineering CS 373 with Professor Downing. I was a little apprehensive before class started because I am a Business Major and I don't have the prerequisites that most of the other students in the class have. But after speaking with Dr. Downing and given my current knowledge of programming I am confident I can do well in this class.

Dr. Downing said we wont be learning about software per se but the things that go around software like the development process and related. We talked about GitHub and version control which is all really new material for me. But I felt like I understood most of what was going on. I didn't know anything about caching but hopefully with the TA's help, Arun, I will be able to learn what I don't know. Arun seemed like a really helpful guy.

So some of the books are free, there is a quiz every day which is a good thing because it will keep us on our feet. We're suppose to ask questions in Piazzza (which always make me think of pizza haha), Piazza seems really cool and reminds me a lot of Google Wave. We talked about the 3n+1 problem, I didn't quite understand the gist of the algorithm but that wasn't important it sounded like. What was important was the technqiues in designing solutions and versioning them. I felt like I could understand this.

Professor Downing also talked about writing the stupidest quickest solution possible because we care about the human. We don't care about the machine, humans get tired, machines dont. After building a dumb quick solution we version it and then we can start working on improving the solution. This is what Git is all about.

I am looking forward for Monday's lecture but I'm not sure what I am suppose to have prepared for it other than what the syllabus says which is reading chapter 1-8.

I'm also suppose to get some UML software, the books, and something with Collatz? I think I have to come up with a solution or something. Ill start a bulk of my work tomorrow.

Goals for this class: Hopefully this class will teach me good techniques in designing software. One of my dreams is to do a start up with some friends. So by taking this class I hope to get closer to that. Also it would be great to meet people who are as passionate about software as I am.

Great so I hope I written enough. Till next week,

Omar

"Chance favors the prepared individual."