Sunday, November 27, 2011

Week #14 (11/21 - 11/25)

With class being cancelled on Wednesday and Friday there really isn't much to talk about. We got to the initial presentations on Monday and I felt that both teams did well, though the second group shot themselves in the foot with, what I assume was, slow internet due to them running out of bandwidth. Out of the two groups I think the best feature was the Team Xtreme's recommended results on misspelled searches (honestly, that's going to be tough to beat).

I'm looking forward to the rest of the presentations this week, however the final test has me feeling a bit apprehensive. I haven't really thought about it yet, but I really need to try and find a better way to study for it given my poor performance on test #2. Unfortunately it looks like all of my professors are trying to cram stuff in this week (as is the norm, sadly) so we'll see how much time I can devote to studying before Thursday night.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Week #13 (11/14 - 11/18)

So we wrapped up the final project with a wimper rather than a bang. This phase of the assignment really felt much more laid back than previous iterations to the point that instead of working on code the night before it was due, we were simply wrapping up documentation and the ilk. Looking ahead we only have the presentation left, though my group doesn't present till the last day before exam #3.

In class this week we spent time covering both singletons and reflection. Over all the material continued the trend of being interesting though I'm not sure exactly how they relate to the topic of "Software Engineering". After the lecture on Friday me and some of my classmates reflected on the fact that we had just finished the last lecture we would ever have from Prof. Downing since we will all be graduating in the spring. Looking back, I am glad that I took both this class and OOP since the concepts/topics covered were both interesting and useful, but I can't say I'll miss some of these projects.

Tomorrow is the first day of presentations, I'm interested to see how each group attempted to differentiate their creation from other groups.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Week #11 (11/7 - 11/11)

So Phase three of WC has been going a lot smoother than the previous phases in my opinion. Part of the reason for this is that for a lot of the features we've been able to find libraries that already exist and simply plug them in with minimal code. This has really sped up the process and has also allowed us to distribute and parallelize the work across the team. Over all I would say that this is definitely the least stressful out of all the WC phases.

Part of the reason that this phase is more enjoyable than other phases is the fact that it's pretty open ended. The only real requirement we had was to implement search, while everything else was left at the discretion of the team. It's nice to have that type flexibility in a cs porject since usually you're working off a specific spec provided by the instructor. In fact I think this is the first time at UT that I've had a CS programming assignment that was this open-ended.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Week #11 (10/31 - 11/04)

This past week we turned in phase 2 of World Crisis. Over all I think the process went off without any hitches. We managed to break up the work evenly enough but at the same time kept each individual subgroup informed of the over all progress of the group that when we put all the major parts together there weren't any serious problems. The third phase seems to be a lot more open ended than the previous phases, so I'm not too sure how my group will do.

We've spent a lot of time in class covering the stuff from the Refactoring textbook. While I was looking forward tot his part of the class so far the examples we've covered have felt pretty straight forward to me with almost no surprises. Hopefully we'll cover some unique solutions soon, because otherwise I'm not really sure what the point is of having an in depth discussion on the topic is. I'm also wondering how exactly we'll be tested over this material.