Student Blogs
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. |
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Wrapping up Construction I – Wohoo!
Last week I finished the first mini of our 3-mini Construction class (a mini is half a semester), and I must say that Construction has been all that it was promised to be—exciting, fun, a lot of cool stuff—all while learning many new things. In just over seven weeks, my excellent kick-ass team put together a prototype of a social-networking based MovieRecommender website that provides movie information, and the ability to purchase movie tickets on the web as well as the phone. We took parts of the requirements that we had gathered in the Spring 2007 semester and in SCRUM style we have iteratively planned, managed and implemented the product backlog items one week at a time. In the end, our team not only has developed a product that we are very proud of, but we’ve also over-delivered because we got so excited about this product and the technologies. Ruby on Rails was the savior in developing multiple views for our application: from HTML for the web, to trimmed-down versions in XHTML for advanced mobile phones, to WML views for old-fashioned cellphones, and … get this… VXML for voice-recognition!
VXML? Voice-recognition? Yup, you heard it right. What happened is that our team got ahead of the game pretty early; we were the first one to deliver the mobile views, getting the unit tests to run, and getting the integrated build systems to work. After already delivering the purchase-tickets feature or showing maps of movie theaters on the cellphone via GoogleMaps or even geocoding zip codes into “nearby theaters” by using Yahoo’s GeoCoding webservice, we decided that the last task of allowing users to reserve restaurants was just too boring for us, and that we wouldn’t learn anything new. So, we sat down with our faculty and negotiated with him to deliver the VXML/Voice-recognition instead. With much research and fun we used Tellme Networks’ free VXML-development environment to develop a voice-solution that allows you to call a 1-800 number to access movie information. Tellme’s call server would access the necessary movie information by accessing the VXML files that we developed and hosted on the Carnegie Mellon West web servers. How cool is that? In fact, the stuff that we do in our technical track has become so cool, that two students in the development track have already decided to switch to the technical track!
This example demonstrates again that CMU West ain’t your typical master’s program. Where else do you get to develop with state-of-the-art technologies and practice new software development lifecycles in a safe environment, increase your breadth of technical knowledge so rapidly, all while having fun and even getting to have a say on the curriculum’s content and direction? Welcome to Carnegie Mellon West.
Happy Holidays!
posted by Minh Nguyen @ 3:38 PM
- A whirlwind semester draws to a close
- Ruby on Rails – where hast thou been all my life?
- Foundations of Software Engineering – Getting into...
- Kicking off the Construction class - woohoo!
- Software Metrics Before and After (Part II)
- Just Getting Started here at Carnegie Mellon West!
- May I present to you… Scotland Yard?
- Software Metrics Before and After (Part I)
- Software Architecture Before and After (Part III)
- Balancing school and work
