Liam's Computer Science Learning Journal

          List the 5 most important things that you learned in the course, and why you chose them.           Were there topics would you like to see added or deleted from this course?           First and foremost, this course does excellent work inviting students to consider software from end to end. Prior to CST438, I had worked with many of the individual components and concepts explored in the curriculum, but I had not yet spent much time considering how workflows managing requirements, user experience by way of stories, databases, REST endpoints, front-end interfaces, testing, version control, and deployment of just a single system fit into and define the practice of software engineering. This leads to my next important area: how React applications communicate with REST APIs. This was touched upon in Internet Programming, but I felt CST438 threaded the needle from a more sweeping and nuanced pe...

       Describe some of the differences between using an Agile process and using a  Plan and Document      (or Waterfall) process.           As is typical within many corners of Computer Science, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for effective software development. Two competing paths that have made recurring appearances in this realm for CST438 are Plan-and-Document--also known as Waterfall--and Agile. For the sake of a real world example, I will compare it to future projects I hope to be taking up with the current organization I work for. Within an IT department, Agile workflows would involve security engineers standing up an internal device-compliance dashboard in small, functional pieces: first identifying computers without encryption such as BitLocker, then steadily adding checks for Storage/Application/Elevation control, antivirus, stale device activity, and whatever fresh technological calamity awaits in ...