Week 12

One week less to go, between this class and O S I have been very busy but this week was interesting for Software Engineering. We touched up a little more on refactoring, we kept working on the example of the Blockbuster video store and worked with Java's reflection tool that, in the example of professor Downing, allows for creating an object of a particular type, deciding which type at runtime without using switch nor if statements.

On Wednesday we had a guest speaker who is a former student of professor Downing and took Software Engineering with him. He definitely had good advise for us as well as lots of information about his start up, "The Zebra". As far as advise, he spoke about technical interviews. He recommended a book, whose name I can't remember, but I was surprised it wasn't "Cracking the Coding Interview" because that is the one everyone talks about. However, he also recommended a website called www.careercup.com whose CEO is Gayle Laakmann McDowell, the author of "Cracking the Coding Interview." He also mentioned it is very valuable for students to have interned before looking for a job. Other than that, he spoke quite a bit about his start up and the way their software works. One of the cool things was the issue tracker they use for software repositories. Contrary to Github's, the one they use (Pivotal Tracker) allows them to keep track of points and owners which, in their system, is highly relevant. The layout was pretty different than Github's.

On the other hand, my team and I started working on the very last project of this class. It is a continuation of the previous two projects, so basically we will be enhancing our website with new features. As front end designer, one of the features I recently was able to contribute with, was the incorporation of a search bar so that users can search for any content on our site. I used javascript to call a function upon the clicking of the "Submit" button. The function then parses the user input and searches the database, fun stuff!