CST438 Week 8

This course was a ton of work, but also very fulfilling and rewarding in terms knowledge and skills gained. If I had to decide on my five favorite new things I learned, they would be as follows.

1. Git 

I believe that Git is criminally underrated in terms of skills that software engineers should master. Most people only know the very basics, such as git push, pull, commit, add, and fetch, without understanding the more complex stuff. When I first came into the course, I was in that boat, and it was a blast running into many errors with Git and learning the necessary skills to debug them. The crazy part is that Git goes so deep that I only went a bit deeper during the course. I will continue to learn more about Git.

2. Agile Method

From what I have heard, Agile is popular and very commonly seen in startups, which means that if I were to be hired at such a company, having the basics down already will put me in a great spot. I also think its fun to create epics and stories and complete stories during sprints. I am naturally extroverted so I might also be biased in favor of scrum meetings and teams with tighter communication.

3. React Basics

I am choosing this item because of how popular React is in today's tech industry. If I am not mistaken, it is the most popular frontend library which means that we are almost certainly likely to see it again as industry engineers. Being able to customize our project's React frontend was a thrill and I like the dark theme that I installed on it. I know that the skills I improved on in this course will almost certainly carry over well to that.

4. Service Oriented Architecture

Splitting our backend repo in two and having each part handle a different service was really cool. I especially like that this is something real, large companies do all the time, although apparently to far greater degrees (understandably). I'm not going to lie, it was confusing at first to wrap my head around the concept, but programming it directly really helped me to grasp the idea and now I am quite comfortable with the philosophy of and reasons for microservices. 

5. AWS Deployment

Admittedly, I thought that this was going to be complicated and possibly even dangerous considering the potential of being overcharged by AWS for unaccounted compute on our deployed project. However, as I worked through the assignment, re-read the document and re-watched Prof. Wisneski's video walk through, the process became clear and understandable. Furthermore, my application thankfully deployed successfully after debugging the manifest file error, which only took a few minutes extra. Last but not least, cleaning up was easier than I thought, and should prevent us from getting overcharged, which I'd wager is a great skill on its own. I am now open to learning more about AWS, especially since it's widely used in the industry these days and no doubt a great tool for contemporary software engineers.