Rushing

It has been a very busy week.
Our team has been rushing through the whole week to implement the system. Currently the project progress is not ideal but still okay. The biggest problem we are facing now is that we just realised on Friday what we were developing was different from our original idea and we decided to move back to it. We're still trying hard to modify the system to match the original idea and hopefully it can be done in one or two days.
I also started worrying about the quality of the work. Building a system in two weeks time may be suitable for verifying an idea. However, it is likely that if we want to further develop the system, we'll need a complete rewrite since we didn't spend enough time on architecture design, etc.

Setting Up

It has been a busy week and probably the busiest first week I have experienced in NUS so far.

There were not so many surprises in the first lecture - I'm a ex-CS1101S student and I know what should I expect from a Ben-style course. However, it has been a great chance to make friends, especially with people from other faculties. In addition, the show-and-tell session was fun and there is probably no similar session in other SoC modules.

Due to the ICPC simulation, I just attended part of the workshop on Saturday morning. When I came back at 3:30, the workshop has already ended. I heard from my teammates that the javascript and ajax part was only 10 minutes long and they didn't learn much from it.

Project Progress

Luckily, I was able to form my team right after the first session and the team has an ideal composition: one business guy, one designer and two developers.

Currently, we have decided the main features of our app and designed a basic database schema to support these features. We also have discussed the user interface and drawn down some pictures. Next week will be an execution week.

Looks like a good start. Hope everything will go well.

What I hope to learn in CS3216

Many people said I am good at programming. However, life is not so simple: having good programming skills does not qualify me as a good software engineer. To create a successful software, I need to know more about how to define the right problem, how to manage the project, how to choose to right guys to work with, etc.
Being a smart guy, I of course knew these things very early and have read books like The Mythical Man-Month when I was in high school. Unfortunately, I forgot the knowledge I lent from the books quickly after I stopped reading this kind of books - just like coding, to master the skills and have long time memory of the knowledge, there is no better way than learning from real projects. CS3216 provides me with such chances. I heard from a ex-student that the course is all about projects - you got to work on read stuff. With these projects, I think I will have plenty of practice on these software engineering skills: project management, communication and so on. I hope I can make full use of this opportunity and have a good understanding of the skills when I finish the course.