CSC321 2015F, Class 01: An Introduction to the Course

Overview

Preliminaries

I'll take attendance for the first few days to make sure that I know everyone's name.

CSC 321 - Software Design Principles and Practices

Learn theory, practice, and tools pertaining to the design and construction of software.
Using Agile methodologies
Constructing software under the Software as a Service (SaaS) model
Using Ruby on Rails as our development software

Write down (or type or text yourself) about five things for yourself.
Discuss your answers with the person near you.
- What is common among your answers?
- What do you consider most important among the anwer you came up with?
- Did your partner come up with anything especially important or surprising?
Be prepared to share with the broader class.

Things students came up with

Understanding the relationship between front-end and back-end.
UI design (nope)
Good practices in designing software
- We will cover two primary methodologies: Agile and plan-and-document, with a focus on agile
A vocabulary for communicating with other developers
- And a deeper understanding of the underlying processes
How to analyze/measure where you are within a project.
How to set up a server and deploy software (at least SaaS software).
Not just Saas, but also other models of software we can build.
Writing good code as an individual
Developing software as a member of a team
Working with a client (theory in 321, practice in 322)
Documentation - Getting better at it
Sharing code
Testing and testing frameworks
Databases and SQL.

Questions

Answers

To prepare us for careers in industry
- Better serve the client, our employers, and ourselves
- Even if we aren't writing software, it's useful to know how software can be written
To help us understand practices
To work on another aspect of CS; many of our courses focus on the theory side of CS; this lets us focus on the development side
It's useful
Developing software is fun!
More generally, we learn to develop software because we can have a positive impact on the world through the software we develop.

Look at the course home page and the schedule of topics. http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~rebelsky/Courses/CSC321/2015F/
Think about
- What is surprising?
- What is confusing?
- What don't you see that you expected to see?

Surprising

Ethics essay.
- As you build software, you have a responsibility to think about the ethics of the software you build.
Journaling
- Questions about the reading that you are expected to respond to seriously, usually with a paragraph each.
- I will try to use your journal questions as the prompt for the way I organize the subsequent class period.
What work is due?
- Hasn't migrated from SPOC to course web
No exams. Grading is more on process than product.

Confusing

What does MOOC stand for? Massive Open Online Course
What does SPOC stand for? Small Private/Personalized Online Course
- We take a MOOC, and build a "section" for a smaller group of students.
What does 10.1 mean? First section of chapter 10.
Why doesn't my EdX account work for this course? Edge.EdX and EdX maintain separate accounts.
Why can't I sign up for the MOOC? They changed it a few days ago. You can still the archived version.
Sam screwed up at least one link.
How do we keep it under 7 hours?
- Limit yourself
- Leave time for a reading journal
- Log what you do, so that there's evidence that you tried
Quizzes, weekly, on your own
Tell me about extra credit
- Send me a paragraph within two days
- Value likely to be similar to 151

Other

Sign up for the class on edge.edx.org
Take the week 2 pretest
If you haven't programmed in Ruby, start working on the Ruby tutorial on CodeCademy