CST438 - Week 4

This week was a very busy week in the course. First, I had a bug in my code from Assignment 3 which I still needed to fix. After meeting with the professor and a helpful code review from my partner, Jose Herrera Gallegos, I was able to fix the bug and get last week's assignment working properly. Next, I focused on the new material and watched the recording of the live session. I worked on writing the required methods for assignment 4 and then testing them as per the instructions. This week we also had an exam that consisted of two essays. I wrote the first essay about microservices and their advantages and considerations over a monolithic architecture. For the second essay, I wrote a proposal for a branching strategy or Github source code control. In both essays, I included diagrams (see examples below) and detailed explanations of the underlying concepts in order to fully answer each prompt. Lastly, we had part one of our Capstone Project Proposal due this week. I was tasked with writing about the stakeholders and community associated with the project, as well as the approach and methodologies we plan to use.

Textbook Review

Software Engineering at Google

Rating: 2 ⭐️ ⭐️

I like this textbook as it is written well and in simple terms with a conversational tone. This makes it an easy read and easy to understand. The topics are explained thoroughly and broken down into logical sections. While it focuses on what is used at Google, it also mentions other strategies and does not limit the material solely to Google's processes. However, the text is highly verbose and takes a long time to read about each concept. A more concise and direct explanation would be preferred.

Full Stack Development

Rating: 3 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

This textbook is clear, direct, and concise. However, it includes a lot of code snippets with less focus on explaining the concepts. Personally, I would rather have a more complete explanation of the underlying concepts and less code to review. Reading code in a textbook is hard to get through and is very tedious. However, the concepts in the book relate to our course material and are helpful in introducing topics, and are good for reference.