CST438 Week 1

    At first, I honestly thought this Software Engineering course would just be like a harder version of the Java class, with more coding and tougher assignments. But after finishing week 1, especially working with REST APIs, I realized it is not just about writing code. It is about the whole process of building software, like planning out how everything fits together, writing unit tests to catch mistakes, and making sure the program can grow and work with other systems. It made me see that software engineering is more about good design and process than just coding itself.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CST370 Week 3

 This week we went over BFS and DFS algorithms. We covered how BFS uses a FIFO queue, while DFS uses LIFO stacks. The first homework focused on DFS and used recursion to take advantage of the implicit stack. Our second assignment was on the Traveling Salesman Problem, using brute force to try all possible paths. Since the input could have up to 15 cities, the program had to generate and check every permutation, which really showed how quickly brute force becomes inefficient.
Read more

CST438 Week 2

     This week I learned how React uses components to build web pages and how data can be passed from a parent to a child using props. I also learned about hooks like useState, which manages state, and useEffect, which runs code when something changes or when the page first loads. I think React is really powerful because it makes it easy to create reusable and interactive parts of a website, and it updates the page quickly without needing to reload everything. One weakness of React is that it can be hard to learn at first because there are so many new concepts like JSX, hooks, and state management. It also requires setting up several tools and libraries to get a full project working, which was a bit overwhelming.
Read more

CST370 Week 5

     This week we went over Kahn’s algorithm, Quick Sort, and how to traverse a BST. I struggled a bit on my first read-through, but going step by step and writing things out helped a lot. Following the pointers in Quick Sort and tracking each step made it easier to understand. For Kahn’s algorithm, building the in degree table and manually popping nodes off my paper queue helped me visualize the process and work through it more clearly. Breaking things into smaller chunks made the material feel a lot more manageable.
Read more