CS373 Spring 2021 Final Entry: Sahithi Golkonda

How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?

I think the course conveyed the takeaways well through the lecture content. The in class exercises were also extremely useful and helped me understand these concepts better. I know these exercises took the place of having tests in this class, and I believe that was a great choice. The exercises helped my understanding of the material, since we were forced to think things through and apply these concepts that we learned.

Were there any other particular takeaways for you?

I also learned a lot about web development, as one would expect, given that our semester long project consisted of building a website. Personally, I also realized I prefer backend development over frontend. Additionally, I was able to gain experience with a ton of tools and technologies that are used in the industry — and I’m glad I have this practical knowledge now.

How did you feel about cold calling?

In my opinion, cold calling really is not anything to be afraid of. I took Professor Downing’s Object Oriented Programming class last semester, so I was already used to the format of the class. Even if you don’t know the answers, Professor Downing is always very understanding and helps you reason through the question to find the answer.

How did you feel about office hours?

I only went to office hours once, but it was very helpful — shoutout Caitlin! The TAs are the best resources we have for questions regarding the projects and the many technologies required for them.

How did you feel about lab sessions?

I didn’t end up going to lab sessions this semester.

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

I especially enjoyed learning how to use APIs. It’s crazy how much free data there is online, and it’s very cool to know how to access some of it now. In fact, I was actually able to apply my API knowledge in a hackathon project this weekend (and we won!).

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

My group used Google’s custom search API to grab images for our website, which was very useful. This tool played a large factor in the backend, because we were able to quickly get relevant images for each instance in our database.

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

The complete disconnect between the lecture material and the projects is something I wasn’t too fond of. Although I know it is not possible to go over every web dev concept in class, I would’ve appreciated a few lectures on some of the complex tasks, like deploying the website and how to integrate the frontend and backend.

Give me your suggestions for improving the course.

I think incorporating a few key lectures (as specified above) that tie back to the IDB project or web development would help us get a better understanding of web dev, and would make parts of the project go a little smoother.