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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. |
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Wrapping up Construction III and Starting the Practicum
Whoa—I haven’t blogged for 6 weeks now. Time flies when so many things are happening at school. For one, we’ve completed the Construction III mini. Like I already mentioned in my last blog, I thought that that class was one of the best classes at Carnegie Mellon West.
Our team architected the actual movie recommendation engine that is to be used in our MovieRecommender website. It was a complex architecture, the algorithms were highly mathematical, and our team prided itself in coming up with a beautiful design that would accommodate for all the requirements, all while making use of previous work and research done by more than 20+ classmates in previous semesters. We then constructed the Java-based recommendation engine, plugged it into our existing Ruby on Rails-based MovieRecommender website and then coded several recommendations algorithms that together provide movie recommendations for you based on your past ratings and social network.
It was a very fun and cool project, and I am very proud of what our team has accomplished in this little time.
After Construction III, we had a 1-week vacation (that I spent in
The practicum is our opportunity to apply all that we have learned so far to a real project from a real customer. The practicum used to be a requirement for the technical track, but the curriculum was changed so that one could replace it with another elective. I don’t know why anyone would want to do that though, because I can’t imagine something more useful and hands-on than a project with a real client and real risks, scope and deadlines.
I chose to do the practicum because I imagine that I will benefit and learn the most doing an actual project with an actual company, and I will strive to really apply all the best practices and knowledge that I have gained at CMU West so far. At a practicum fair last month we were introduced to several projects with companies such as PayPal, Nokia as well as internal projects with Carnegie Mellon West. Through a selection process, I was matched with the website-development project with PayPal, which was actually my first choice since I miss doing production-level web development.
My team is currently negotiating with the PayPal managers on the scope of our project, and are in the process of gathering requirements and producing UI mockups, but I am very excited to hear that we have decided on coding in C#, ASP.NET,
Next time:
posted by Minh Nguyen @ 1:48 PM
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