Week One

This blog is about my experiences taking CS 373 Software Engineering at the University of Texas in Austin, taught by Glenn Downing.

The first week was a short week. On the first day of class, Glenn spent 25 minutes explaining the syllabus and then turned the class over to a guest speaker. The speaker, whose name I cannot remember, worked for Microsoft and was on campus promoting the Imagine Cup 2009. He gave his best spiel with the hope of getting students interested. Too bad the deadline for registration was the next day.

Day two came, and Glenn spent the entire class period explaining the first assignment: 3n+1 in Python. Not a difficult problem, and one that most of the students have previously solved if they had taking one of Glenn's other classes. This being a software engineering class, there were some additional requirements beyond actually solving the problem: Provide a suite of unit tests, provide html documentation of all code written, and make use of Subversion.

A final thought: Interesting to have an assignment before having an actual lecture...