CST 438 - Week 8

The five most important takeaways from this course, in my opinion, were
1) The use of GitHub projects. I believe this will come in very handy for future jobs and also personal projects. It gave me a taste of what it is like to coordinate code with a group and resolve potential conflicts.

2) The Agile philosophy. Agile seems to be a trend with how companies organize projects these days and I know that many employers that I've been in contact with so far prefer a candidate with experience in the methodology. Learning the concept of iterations and sprints and how they relate to organizing a project is going to be invaluable for me on the job.

3) Code reviews. So far I've mostly worked on projects solo or with a single partner. Seeing the process of code reviews and how they can be used not only to comment on code functionality, but code design and even documentation is something I'd never really thought about in the past.

4) TDD. While I've always known that testing was an important part of software design, the idea of writing tests before implementation is very interesting to me and I can see how it would lead to better functionality. Any time I've written a test in the past, I've found myself having to refactor code in order to be able to test it in a way that makes the most sense. I think writing the tests first could make my code cleaner and save me a lot of time.

5) React. I have a major interest in web development and knowing React could prove invaluable to me when looking for a job. While I don't find it as intuitive as I found Node.js, I loved figuring out the interactions between the components and seeing how they came to life on screen.

CST 438 - Week 7

This week we learned a bit more about the Plan and Document process versus the Agile process. The Agile process that we're a little more used to involves more flexibility when it comes to the requirements surrounding a project. The timeline is broken up into small iterations or sprints where smaller, working chunks of code are created and delivered. In the Waterfall process, delivery of the complete project happens at the end and the requirements are more rigid. When we develop using the Agile process, feedback is often and expected, which can lead to a lot of re-working code and pivoting to accommodate design changes. When using the Plan and Document style, the planning happens up front and any design changes need to undergo a formal procedure to do so. I can see how there are benefits to both strategies depending on the scale and length of the project, but so far I like the flexibility of the Agile process as it is more in line with the way I naturally approach projects with many parts.

CST 438 - Week 6

 This week we spent time learning about how Google and how they handle the infrastructure for services on such a large scale. One of the solutions involved in managing this problem is by automating what you can. While some automations are simple, like executing a shell script or monitoring machines, automating scheduling becomes more involved and once you have multiple machines with different environments, you must create further strategies to manage processing at that scale. One concept that stood out to me in this chapter is the concept of containers. While I've used Docker for multiple classes now, I wouldn't say I have a firm grasp on the advantages of using it. For example, why couldn't you just provide me with the dependencies I need? In this current project, I've actually gotten a small taste of why having a contained environment would be useful. For example, when designing the CSS for this project, I just messaged my partners to tell them to install bootstrap and react-bootstrap for their projects. I can only imagine how complicated it would get with multiple engineers working on multiple processes that all require their own dependencies.