I’m sorry if the title is supposed to be “What you hope to learn in CS3216” because that made no sense to me.

Hello World!

This blog is set up with Jekyll-Bootstrap, with GitHub Pages, so I get this pretty cool domain for free! Yay!

Moving on..

What I hope to learn in CS3216

Preamble

I’ve been doing programming for a long time (since sec 1). I’ve slogged through the National Infocomm Competition circuit and its various competitions quite a few times, and won far too few of them for my liking. Still, through these competitions, I have picked up a proficiency in web programming and webapp design in general, specifically in Javascript and PHP (it was cool then, okay?).

I’m only a Y2 student, which means I’ve only gone through the usual CS1101S+CS2020,CS2100,CS2107 courses, but all of these felt a little easy for me. Over the summer, I did CVWO, which was admittedly quite challenging so that’s fun. And there’s where I picked up Ruby on Rails and am now reasonably proficient with RoR. That would make me a decent full-stack developer, I think. That brings me to #1:

We need to go deeper

I’d love to delve deeper into Web Development. While I’ve done web dev for a long time, most of it is composed of terrible code and mostly hacked together for a two-week project or competition and discarded.

As a result, I’ve never really immersed myself in an environment where I have to write good, well-documented code (CVWO aside), and use the best practices available. Maybe CS3216 isn’t the best place for that, but I’d like to think that I could do things right the first time. I’d also like to delve deeper beyond what I’ve already done in Javascript (Node/Bootstrap/React) and Ruby on Rails and hopefully get better at them in time to make my killer app in the final project.

Life (and your product) is more than just code

Due to the limited size and scope of my past projects, I’ve almost never had to market anything. And where I have, perhaps for a hackathon here or a competition there, I’ve almost always failed miserably because I get caught up in the details of implementation and the feasibility, and perhaps fail to grasp what the key selling points are, how to appeal to potential users or even what to appeal to.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’d like to learn the rest of what goes into developing a successful app beyond the, y’know, developing-the-app part of it. Design, marketing, and experience all go a long way in ensuring that actual people use your app and continue to use it in the future, and that’s what I hope to take away from this the most.