I returned to Austin from my four weeks back home last Saturday and spent the few days before classes started preparing all that I would need to begin my semester. All of the required textbooks for all of my classes were delivered before Tuesday luckily. Since my schedule is so off-kilter this semester, I only had one class to start off my semester, but four the next day. And because it was only the first week, the classes were simple and relatively easy.
What's in your way?
My main obstacle to overcome is understanding what we will actually be doing in the upcoming projects and becoming comfortable being graded on something I have absolutely no experience in. I have never done any kind of website design or web development, so I know nothing about any of the tools on the class webpage, and that makes me nervous even though I know by the end of the semester I will be familiar with a good portion of them.
What will you do next week?
Next week starts the real challenge because that is when most classes start giving you the real assignments so I will get to see what a real work-load for a week will look like. I will also start the required reading for all my classes which means I can discover which books will be interesting or not this semester. I am looking forward to finding out what the first project is, and possibly what the other projects will be like.
What are your expectations for the class?
I expect to learn how to create and manage the front and backend of a website over the course of the semester. Since there is a big disconnect between classwork and the projects I also expect to learn a lot about software engineering, but I am not very clear on topics of the class more specific than that.
What's your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
I found the idea of asserts as computation comments interesting. I had never thought of them that way in previous classes, and I really like the idea of using them as such in the future, though careful not to overuse them or use them to check user input.
