CS373 Spring 2023: Tara Sophia Roshan: Final Entry

• How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?

The course material was set up well, but it was difficult at times to find resources for the project (aside from just... copying code, which didn't really help me learn all that much). I really enjoyed the lectures and paper readings.

• Were there any other particular takeaways for you?

I had big issues with one of my groupmates not contributing and I still feel that the rest of my group didn't truly appreciate the stress and effort that I had when dealing with this member. In general, I feel very frustrated when looking back on our group dynamics. I'm not sure what to take away from this, though. I told my teammates and TA about the situation, but I still felt isolated and under-appreciated. I wish I hadn't been the only girl on my team.

• How did you feel about cold calling?

It was kind of stressful but fun! I didn't have any bad cold-calling experiences because I just saw it as a fun challenge.

• How did you feel about specifications grading?

It made the process of preparing for the class less stressful. It feels more intuitive than the classic grading scheme of "make sure you get this average score with these assignment weights" because I wasn't constantly calculating my average. It was less stuff for me to be concerned about and keep in my head at all times.

• How did you feel about help sessions and office hours?

I never attended office hours, but I found the help sessions with the TAs to be very useful!

• How did you feel about the support from the TAs?

I really appreciated the TA help sessions. The weekly check-ins felt redundant, but they helped us organize our team meetings and they helped to show which members were more invested in the project and which weren't paying much attention to our progress.

• 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?

They've given me a basic framework for analyzing and refactoring code, but I don't fully understand them yet since I didn't do much focused practice of the SOLID design principles. I just read about them instead of doing any exercises with them.

• You should have read two papers that advised minimizing getters and setters. What insights have they given you?

Do work closer to the data. Try to ask people to do the work for you instead of asking them to get the data for you?

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

React! I also learned about Postman, which was very helpful in understanding requests.

• What's the most helpful Web dev tool your group used that was not required?

Probably the browser console. I got a lot of information from using the console!

• How did you feel about your group having to self-teach many technologies?

In some aspects, I felt like it was an excuse to sit back and just grade our work. I appreciate the independent inquiry that we did, however I feel like the TAs or the instructor should've played more active roles in monitoring our group progress and our independent contributions to the group. In Phase 2 especially, I felt very isolated because the other member of the frontend didn't help me, so I had to work during Spring Break to complete the phase. And I don't think the backend truly appreciated how much work I did and stress I went through. I think they just saw it as me doing what was expected of me.

• In the end, how much did you learn relative to other UT CS classes?

I think I learned a lot of bits and pieces but I didn't put everything together into a cohesive whole. Especially with regards to our project, I feel like I didn't learn some key parts of the React framework. That being said, I really enjoyed this class, the TAs, and the instructor. I know a lot of work was put into this class.