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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog
 | Rahul is a full-time MS Software Engineering, Technical Track student. He loves traveling, trekking, swimming and is a complete movie buff. |
 | Anthony is a 2nd year part time student in the MS Software Engineering, Technical track program and works at OSIsoft as a Software Engineer. He loves spending time with his family, hiking, biking, gardening, cooking, and sometimes photography. |
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Suma is an alumna of the MS Software Engineering, Technical Track program. A Mechanical Engineering undergrad, she loves writing and is passionate about music, shopping and dogs. |
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Minh is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and alumnus of the MS Software Engineering program. He is also a Vietnamese community activist, a cat-lover and passionate fan of film music. |
 | Nick is a Software Engineer at Google and a first-year grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. He loves hiking, gaming, and both really extremely good and extremely bad movies. |
Monday, November 19, 2007
Foundations of Software Engineering – Getting into the good stuff
Ah, how time flies when you're busy. It seems like just yesterday I was starting out and getting to know my team. However, just last Saturday we performed a demo to our Marketing VP (one of the faculty members) that showed off almost all the functionality he was interested in. So we're into the home stretch with a pretty good idea of where to go.
For some background, the first course, Foundations of Software Engineering, consists of taking a piece of existing code and upgrading it with new functionality. We have taken a basic project management tool (actually the results of last year's students' work in this course) and added the capability for it to associate tasks with specific users, log time against tasks, show reports, and show a personal to-do list of the things a specific user needs to see. We've been actually coding over the course of two three-week iterations so far, with one more to come.
We're nearly done with the basic requirements, so this upcoming iteration I'll be able to spend some time untangling and refactoring the code in some areas to make it more maintainable and understandable (possibly even testable). The rest of the team will be polishing up the UI and functionality based on the VP of Marketing's feedback on how he wants the end result to look.
I'm definitely understanding a lot more of what goes into a project – how the decisions you make to start with are rarely 100% correct. We've been splitting up some of the work in non-optimal ways over the past iterations which we are hoping we can rectify with our work on the upcoming one. I'm sure that even then, we'll be able to look back and reflect on some ways to improve. I plan on breaking down the structure of the first course in its entirety once I'm finished, but if there are any specific topics anyone is interested in, feel free to leave it as a comment and let me know.
posted by Nick Lynn @ 11:50 AM
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Kicking off the Construction class - woohoo!
So here I am at the beginning of the Construction class that is slated for the next 1.5 semesters all the way up to the summer of 2008. In construction, we’ll be doing the main core software engineering activity: writing code. As a student of the technical track who thoroughly enjoys programming, I am certain that I am going to have a lot of fun with this class. In fact, when the content of the class was revealed to me a few weeks ago, I was already overly excited and couldn’t wait to start.
Well, the project that we are going to implement is a social-networking-based MovieRecommender portal that we touched upon in the last several semesters. Yup, it’s the same project that we had gathered requirements and built a mock website for in Spring 2007, and the same one we architected in Summer 2007.
What’s cool is that we’ll be implementing the website in Ruby on Rails, which I think is going to be a terrific opportunity for me to learn about this up and coming web framework. What I have read so far about Ruby and Rails is very impressive and promising, so I am looking forward adding this language to my skill set and hopefully even using it for my next non-profit or hobby website that I’ll create.
Now, what’s really cool is that we are not just building a plain-old static website, we are also going to build a mobile version as well to be run on PDAs and cellphones. Now that’s strategic, because the mobile industry is growing in the United States at a rapid rate, and having these skills is certainly a plus on your resume (besides the ego-boost you get by showing your girlfriend this application you wrote directly on her cellphone). To top this all off, Carnegie Mellon West even equipped each student in this class with a fancy-dancy Nokia N95 phone that we can use for the next three “minis” to test our application, including a 2 gig memory card and pre-paid SIM cards. In other words, I am getting bragging rights to take revenge on all those Iphone owners and can pretend that I actually have the money to buy a $700 phone!
So, as you can see, the CMU folks saved the best class for last. So far, I’ve just been setting up my development environment and reading Ruby on Rails books, and our team already met once to build our first Hello World pages. Throughout the last ten days since this class has started, I have already learned a ton of new stuff, both in terms of programming languages, but more so about the tools. As a person who has been solely focused on Microsoft technologies since ever, there were a lot of “firsts” for me. I had to install, configure and learn MySql, MySql Admin, Subversion, NetBeans, Ruby, Rails, Mongrol… heck I even had to install the latest Java runtime, as apparently I don’t even have that (I know, embarrassing for someone here in Silicon Valley)! Anyways, I think by next week, our team will already be cranking out Movie Recommender web pages like there’s no tomorrow. I am looking forward to it, yay!
PS: Have I mentioned how cool this class is going to be?
posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 10:17 AM
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