Week 1 of class and I’ve already got a full project done, started work on a side project (this website), and I’m apparently going to be writing a blog post a week for the rest of the class. Add in the fact that we’ve already begun using at least 6 important industry tools for coding and you’ll see why almost every Computer Science major at UT will recomment taking a “Downing course” taught by none other than Glenn Downing himself.

Having already taken Object Oriented Programming with him, I was excited for the opportunity to take Software Engineering with him as well. Unfortunately, so was everyone else. Long story short: I needed this class to graduate, but I couldn’t get in my last year at UT. Hence the summer school. Looking at the summer school schedule I noticed another class I was interested in: Generic Programming & the STL, taught by Glenn Downing as well. Sign me up! I’m not sure why I didn’t expect it, but having experienced the introduction to three “Downing courses” I now feel rather confident in my ability to write a program to solve the Collatz Conjecture. It’s a great introduction to his class, as most of the time spent isn’t on the problem, but on learning some of the industry tools we’ll be covering in this class. Having used SVN for a while, and then switching to Git a while ago I forget that not everyone is used to using a version control system of some sort. That’s however, where most of my expertise dies down. Only having worked for startups, unit testing hasn’t been priority number 1, and while I’ve been able to take on projects by myself and kick off a ready-made Jenkins build to make sure my changes don’t break the system, I haven’t ever been able to configure a Continuous Integration (CI) tool from the ground up, so that’s been rather fun.

The big thing I’ve herd from this class is working in groups to create an entire website from the ground up including back end work, front end work, and database. Even though I could easily work on being the AngularJS front end guy, I’m really hoping I can take this time to learn Python’s Django framework to create a back end REST API. Here’s to hoping!

###Tip of the week! Git supports aliases! Try them out! One of the first things I’ll do on a machine that I’ll spend any amount of time on is Google “git aliases” and add the first six aliases to git. Alternatively you could use rsync to sync your .gitconfig file between machines, but that’s for another day.