CS 373 Spring 2024: Final Entry:
How well do you think the course conveyed the class takeaways?
I think the strongest course takeaways were learning to work well in a team on a multi-tool project. We needed to use and document all of our tools very well so that all 5 of our members could understand every aspect of our project.
Were there any other particular takeaways for you?
I think our team ended up learning a lot from other teams in the previous years. If you have resources at your disposal, don't be afraid to use them.
What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?
Honestly, working mostly on the front-end, I found our own Postman documentation to be extremely helpful. Having the endpoints and descriptions in one place without needing to dig through our backend code ended up saving a lot of time and helped our final product to be better.
What's the most helpful Web dev tool your group used that was not required?
Adding React Bootstrap to the project helped a lot with keeping the CSS files reasonably long while still making the website looking nice.
How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many technologies?
Self-teaching is one of the best ways to actually learn something in my opinion. It was still nice to have a TA to check-in every week with so we weren't completely lost.
In the end, how much did you learn relative to other UT CS classes?
This class felt like it was one of the most aplicable to our careers after college. All of the tools used were realistic.
Class Features
Pair programming on Hacker Rank
I thought working with a partner was a lot more fun and helped people to not get stuck as easily on the exercises. However, I think there should have been an option to work alone if you chose to.
Cold calling
I actually didn't hate the cold calling, it helped to ensure that I was paying attention every class and I thought the questions were silly and fun.
Rubrics on Gitlab issues
This was an extremely helpful feature, it got our team used to using Gitlab as a way to track progress, which felt like something that we should get used to for real-world jobs.
CATME peer reviews
I thought these were helpful to an extent, but ultimately they felt like bloat at the end of every project. Maybe this is because I never really had issues with my team. I felt like they should be optional.
PechaKucha
I think this is a very cool idea, but I think it would be a lot more helpful by enforcing some way for the teams to work more together. Almost every one that I've seen so far just seems like a every team member did their slides on their own.
Tip-of-the-week
Get the adobe cloud with the student discount, it is only $20 for students and you can use great software like After Effects, Photo Shop, and Firefly.