CS373 Spring 2022: Luca Santos: Final Entry
3 min readMay 9, 2022
- How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?
I think that throughout the semester the course has been able to excellently convey most takeaways. - Were there any other particular takeaways for you?
I think that refactoring and testing were both takeaways that were of particular interest to me. I really enjoyed the examples that we looked at in class with the different types of refactoring and the emphasis on building a robust testing framework for our semester project. - How did you feel about cold calling?
I did not really care having my name called out during class and I think that it encouraged me to engage more with the content being presented. I felt like I had extra motivation to be alert. - How did you feel about specifications grading?
It was extremely confusing at first but I did not really feel affected by it. It was different, but I will only know how much of a difference it made once my final grade for this class comes out. - How did you feel about help sessions and office hours?
I did not attend many of them, but the fact that they were so abundant made me more confident in asking for help. - How did you feel about the support from the TAs?
I feel like most of them were available for questions both through discord and piazza. I asked questions to my TA directly through discord more than once. - You should have read five papers that describe SOLID design: Single Responsibility, Open-Closed Principle, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, and Dependency Inversion. What insights have they given you?
The main idea I gathered from the papers we read over the semester is that abstraction is an excellent tool that can be used to implement abstraction, modularity, flexibility and maintainability within a code base. - You should have read two papers that advised minimizing getters and setters. What insights have they given you?
Similar to my answer above, it made me more aware of the types of scenarios under which abstraction might be helpful and necessary. - What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?
Git branching was extremely helpful during the development of our semester project. - What’s the most helpful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?
Heroku for our backend hosting! - How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many, many technologies?
It was difficult at first but in the end I believe it was worth it. A self-starter attitude and curiosity are industry skills that will be indispensable. - In the end, how much did you learn relative to other UT CS classes?
I learned a whole lot, mostly outside of the classroom. - Give me your suggestions for improving the course, but apologies in advance; specifications grading will remain.
I think that requiring some questions to be made through EdDiscussion does not make much sense if the response times can take up so much sometimes.
