CS373: Final Entry

• What did you like the least about the class?
  I didn’t like how we didn’t get to choose our team for our project. However, my team actually turned out really well so I’m not really upset. I think the random team matching is good for students who don’t know other people going into the class, so my complaint is pretty personal. I don’t have anything bad to say about this class really.
• What did you like the most about the class?
  I liked the lectures. Even though they’re not relevant to our projects, I found them really enjoyable.
• What’s the most significant thing you learned?
  I’ve never learned SQL before so working with SQL was pretty interesting. Also, I feel like I understand the inner workings of Python much more now.
• How many hours a week did you spend coding/debugging/testing for this class?
  5–7 hours. Mostly because my team was quite strong and we worked well together. Also, our website is functional but doesn’t look amazing.
• How many hours a week did you spend reading/studying for this class?
  Almost none. The only tested material is from in class. I studied for a couple hours before each test.
• How many lines of code do you think you wrote?
  I did frontend, so a couple thousand probably. The backend code will be fewer lines.
• What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?
  Postman is very useful for generating API docs.
• What’s the most useful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?
  React-router for frontend routing.
• How did you feel about the cold calling, in the end?
  Cold calling is great! It keeps me engaged. I enjoyed watching other students answer questions.

Overall I think this class could be extremely difficult if your group lacks web development experience. Some of my friends spent 40+ hours on each project whereas my group spent 10–15. The lectures go by pretty fast and are engaging, and the tests aren’t too hard (although I haven’t taken the final yet so we’ll see). There’s also daily quizzes, but there’s plenty of extra quiz grades offered outside of class as well, so I wouldn’t stress at all about your quiz grades. If you’re looking to learn web development and get the closest experience to software engineering offered at UT, this is the class for you.