CS373 Spring 2021: Final Entry

How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?

I think these takeaways are conveyed well through the lectures. And the exercises also strengthened my understanding in them.

How did you feel about cold calling?

I’m pretty used to cold calling now. And because of the class size of this semester I only got cold called twice.

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

I worked completely on the frontend this semester and all the frontend tools such as react use states and use effects, bootstrap/material ui, and d3 graphs are new to me and I find them interesting and useful for the frontend development. I also had the chance to incorporate my workflow with docker more closely.

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

The algolia search was helpful to implement the whole-site search functionality without extra work on our backend apis. Also a heads up for the future students: the material ui table comes with the sorting and filtering functionality, so using that instead of implementing your own(what we did since react-bootstrap is not that powerful) saves you a lot of time.

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

I learned a lot on how to write frontend code. More importantly, I feel more comfortable picking up a completely new technology.

Give me your suggestions for improving the course.

As some other students mentioned, people that work on the frontend for this web project may not have too many chances apply what they learn from the lectures. So I feel maybe the lectures can also cover some typescript/JavaScript content(especially the type part of typescript), frontend unit-tests and maybe some very basic react(react lifecycle, class vs function, etc.)