CS Online Weekly Updates

What is the most interesting thing you have learned in your reading of "Software Engineering at Google"? One thing that I found interesting was that EVERYONE gets their code reviewed. Even senior engineers. In the business world or many fields, whoever the highest ranking official is, has the last say and usually no one checks them. But in software engineering, even the senior engineers need reviewing at Google. It shows that everyone can learn and ensures quality of code from everyone. 

Describe what are the good points about using Git for source code management.  What are possible problems that Git merge does not solve when merging code from different developers?  Git has a ton of features that help code management. It allows a group of people to work simultaneously and separately keeping track of changes and having branches and can revert those changes and restart them if necessary.  Some problems are that when lines are changed by multiple people, merge conflicts arise obviously, so it is up to the users to go in and manually fix them. Or the code might merge but have errors and not run properly due to everyones merges, and also if multiple people write the same code functions it just adds all of them and so the work clearly has to be split up and everyone needs to know what the others are working on. 

Summarize what you learned about React this week.  In your opinion, what the strengths and weaknesses of React.  This week I learned about React which is a component based javascript framework. It uses a virtual DOM that updates only the parts of the page that change. I learned how to create stateful components using useState which allows data to update automatically when changed. Also useEffect to fetch data when a component loads. And lastly useRef to reference real DOM elements.  I also learned how to use Route and Link to navigate between components and different pages. I built forms with registration, logins, and CRUD management. Some strengths: React is fast and only updates what changes and the code is reusable so we don't have to keep rewriting, and also its easy to use with tailwind and other tools.  Some weaknesses:  It is a bit confusing to learn, at least for me right now (using document.querySelector were a bit easier for me), I get confused be...

What did you expect a course in Software Engineering would cover?    I expected this course to cover how to build software, not just program and code but to actually use things that are used in the real world. I hear so much about AWS, React, and things that are needed other than programming languages, that are crucial to our success, but we have not used. I would hope to be able to to learn how to actually publish and deploy real big projects, or at least know how to versus basic programming.  After completing week 1, how has your opinion changed?  I wouldn't say my opinion has changed much. So far we are using things we will use in the real world, like Spring. And I have looked ahead at the course and seen others like Agile and AWS. Software Engineering is putting our programming skills to use and doing so properly making our projects be able to scale, and withstand the test of time, and have good sustainability and maintainability. I am excited to learn more as th...