Software Engineering – Week the First
All things have a beginning: last week was the beginning of my 3rd semester here at UT Austin. It was also my first week in a class taught by Downing. I’d heard a lot of things in a lot of places–from the conversation that ensued after a chance meeting with a graduating senior in the Palo Alto Sheraton last fall, to the enthusiastic nudging from a friend and cubical-neighbor to take OOP with Downing–a friend who happened to also TA for him. And I think I realize what this teaching style is and it makes me nostalgic: after the first day of 373, I felt the same way I did after my first day on my first major programming project.
I learned how to code on a live project: I jumped into a roughly 30k-line Python project under SVN version-control (at the time) designed to export binary representations of 3-D game data (animations, images, basic logic). I was 12 at the time and quickly learned how to not drown in the complexities of a decently-sized project (I guess you can call it swimming). When I started to piece together the details of the first project I realized why this was a fundamentally different course–I was finally in a class who’s projects play like the “big kids”: VCS, iterative development, testing strategies, design, discussion, algorithm planning. This was the way I learned development when I was 12–put right in the thick of it and I was happy to be back.
To say my early exposure to structured collaborative exposure was a good thing is an understatement. During my past summer at Samsung developing software, the single most important sequence of experiences I had for understanding what was going on was not my college courses–they helped with theory–but my time spent before high school contributing to Open Source projects. I feel like the following 9 or so weeks of instruction will not only let me stretch my legs from the acute, specific assignments all-to-common in normal computer science courses, but also offer me insight into the reasoning behind the strategies to many development structures I have learned only learned through example and know only as convention.
1/21/2014