CST 300 - Week 3 - Things You Should Know

 Part 1

Last week I listed note taking as something I could improve on. Generally my notes are not as thorough as I want them to be, and my writing is sometimes messy. Beyond the obvious improvement of writing neater (haha), one tip that stuck out to me from the study strategy side was the idea of the Split Page Method.

Essentially splitting your note page into three columns. The first is notes directly from your textbook. The second is notes directly from class. The third is questions you or other students ask the professor. I like the idea of doing the first column before a lecture, to allow me to connect what was in the book to the lecture immediately. Definitely something I will try as I finish up my lower division courses.

Part 2

Update the learning journal to include what you have learned from this week's readings and activities—especially the materials on ethics.

This week was good. I think it made me really appreciate the transformation between a draft and final version in regards to our Industry Analysis Essay. The feedback I received from my teammates was helpful, and more importantly forced me to re-assess some pieces of my essay. I can see that what I submitted is much better than the first draft I wrote.

In terms of ethics and thinking about what our paper will be about, I found it very interesting how tech seems to be at the forefront of ethical concerns in society. There are so many potential topics against our field of technology. From a purely academic standpoint, I enjoyed reading more on Deontological ethics. This kind of moral-based ethics I think really resonated with me as someone who was born in the US. I feel it’s the basis for many of our cultural norms in this country.

Part 3

The reading assignment “What a Computer Science Major Needs to Know” was quite thorough. In a previous job we had a saying that software engineers need to be T-shaped. Meaning, they have a wide breadth of knowledge (the top of the T), and a deep specialization in one area (the leg of the T). This document definitely aligns with that. Software Engineering as a whole is so broad. No one individual will ever be able to grasp all of it, at the deepest levels. That said, having shallow knowledge in as many areas as possible makes you a more well rounded developer.

A great call out of this is Security. Let’s say you’re an Software Engineer and you’ve poured hours and weeks of work into a Backend Service that exposes RESTful APIs for a Single Page App. All of a sudden your service goes down. You restart, it goes down again. You then notice there’s a wave of DDOS attacks hitting specific endpoints that you exposed. What do you do? If you don’t have a security team to fall back on, you need to think about security. For example:

• Are your endpoints public? Can you add auth tokens to stop bad requests?

• Are there computationally expensive processes called by the endpoints that could be optimized?

• Do you have any endpoint protection in place? (Firewalls)

• Do you have logging to see where attacking requests are coming from?

Security is a deep specialization, but even a shallow understanding of it and the tools available will give you the ability to make better decisions. So being able to have that for many areas of Software will just make you a better developer!

Part 4

Online courses, and online programs have given us a great deal of flexibility for how we learn in a college environment. They have been essential to me as a working professional, to be able to go at my own pace and let me study during my free time. However, they truly represent the idea of “what you put in, you get out”. 

For all classes but especially in CS Online – it is crucial to follow the CSUMB CS Online Code of Integrity. If you’re not being responsible, and doing your own work you are robbing yourself of important learning for your career. We’re all here voluntarily, and have paid an unquestionably large tuition fee to be here – so it only makes sense to put in as much effort as you can, and get out as much knowledge as you can.