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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track program.

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.
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.
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, December 17, 2007

A whirlwind semester draws to a close


Whew. One semester is finally finished. Things definitely get a lot more hectic towards the end of the semester, which seems to have coincided with the rest of my life getting more complicated as well. Over the course of a week, my CMU team prepared our final presentation, added the final bit of functionality to the code (the reports UI, which I'll try to post here for the person who wanted to see how it looked).

Technically, it was not overly complex. It was a relatively straight-forward Java program (swing, some timer threading, and an existing Hibernate/MySql backend) but it definitely taught our team how to learn new tools in a short timeframe. I don't think any of us came into the class knowing much more than just the basic Java practices. The existing code's design patterns and extra technology like Hibernate were not things we had any familiarity with. However, the faculty were able to address some of those issues during weekly information sessions on different technologies we were using.

As for the final iteration, it was by far the most productive yet also most challenging so far. Not only did we need to get our project in perfect shape for demonstration, but we also had to prepare the actual presentation for the demo itself. During our iteration planning session, we realized that reaching every stretch goal initially set for us by our VP of Marketing was not feasible with the time we had, so we cut that feature. We wrapped up coding a couple days before the demonstration and were able to get all our code functioning for the demo. The presentation itself went extremely well and our team wrapped everything up quite well.

Looking back, I think this first semester was pretty effective overall in terms of what I wanted to learn. I definitely got experience with making presentations in a business environment as well as functioning in more of a formal group than what I'm used to at work. I'm looking forward to the next course which will dive deeper into requirements gathering and more of the skills necessary to make real-world software projects successful. Until then, I'm going to relish this holiday season and relax. Happy holidays!






posted by Nick Lynn @ 2:16 PM 

1 Comments:
Blogger Minh T. Nguyen said...

Congratulations on being done with your first semester. I am looking at the screenshot of your product and ... aaah.. nostalgia hits. :-)

December 18, 2007 at 11:24 PM  

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