CS373 Final Entry: David Durairaj

1. What did you like the least about the class?

I actually liked the format of the tests for this course, but I think more time would have been helpful on the tests. Additionally, I think more time could have been spent on databases or just Python in general towards the end of the semester instead of Refactoring.

2. What did you like the most about the class?

I actually really liked both the daily quizzes and his cold-calling because it kept me on my toes and forced me to be engaged. It also pushed me to quickly find help when I didn’t understand something, which in turn helped me learn a tremendous amount of information. Another interesting aspect of this class that I found helpful was the in-class Hacerrank exercises. These exercises gave me practice implementing constructs that we learned in class, which helped me to better understand the material.

3. What’s the most significant thing you learned?

The most significant thing I learned in this course would be the Python programming language and ReactJS. This class was the first time where I had major exposure to these two languages, and I feel better prepared to enter the market place and build my own products.

4. How many hours a week did you spend coding/debugging/testing for this class?

I would say I spent a total of 20hours/week for this class outside of lectures. I did hit 30hrs/week more than once during the semester for my web-app, but a majority of that was done over the weekends.

5. How many hours a week did you spend reading/studying for this class?

I would say I spent about 2 hours a week studying for the quizzes and tests. I spent about 20 minutes a week reading, though that reduced as the course progressed.

6. How many lines of code do you think you wrote?

I wrote about 200–500 lines of code per project, so overall probably around 1500 lines of code altogether.

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

Docker and GitLab are the two tools that I found most useful in this course.

8. What’s the most useful Web dev tool that your group used that was not required?

Other than ReactJS, I would say that the react-bootstrap and react-strap libraries were the most useful tools I used during the development of our web application.

9. If you could change one thing about the course, what would it be?

One thing I would change in this course would be providing more teaching materials for some of the tools that we were required to use. Especially for Flask, there was very little documentation that existed, and so my team spent many hours just figuring out how to use the tool and build our backend API using Flask.