CSUMB Learning Journal

This is the last weekly journal for this course, and I’m not sure I have much to say. I already talked about the final exam and programming assignment 4 in the entry from four days ago. We finished the last programming assignment and I did the chapter 8.9 quiz so I’m done. I think it would’ve been nicer to cover more about network security than what we got in this last half-week of the course, but it’s fine. I learned a lot and I’m going to miss the simple format for the weekly modules as some previous courses in this program were pretty bad. Thanks for the great intro course to computer networks!

We covered chapter 6 of the textbook which was about link layers, but that was overshadowed by the much bigger thing this week, the final exam. One difference I noticed between the midterm and the final was that the midterm had much more overlap with the pre-midterm questions than the final had with the pre-final. That didn’t turn out to be much of an issue since I still scored pretty well in the end. This class is basically over now. I’m not bothering with any more extra credit work since it won’t make a meaningful difference to my grade since I already have an A. There’s just the programming assignment 4, and chapter 8.9 quiz, and the week 8 journal, which I probably won’t have much to say in since I’ll have to turn that in within 4 days from the date this one is published. That’s all for now.

This week we read from chapter 5 in the textbook about the network control plane. I feel like this chapter was more interesting than the previous one about the data plane. It feels like just two weeks ago that we did the midterm and now I have to study for the final! Along with all of that work we have to start our fourth team programming assignment, which will certainly be the most complicated one to date. I’m not too worried about the upcoming final, but I do hope that the work on the programming assignment is easy to divide up between our group members. I feel like this course is ending too soon and that there’s a lot more to learn about computer networking, but it is only an intro I suppose.

I survived week 5, but that’s not saying much since the classwork wasn’t too bad this time. Module 5 was about exploring the data plane network layer. The labs were about Network Address Translation and IPv4 and IPv6. Pretty normal stuff. The programming assignment for the week was a little messy in terms of planning, but we got it figured out, I think… It’s a little annoying that mininet uses Python 3.5.2 (at least on my machine) because when people write code and debug outside of the mininet environment they won’t catch certain issues that only show up once they try to run the code in the vm. The main error is usually related to f-string, which we should probably just remember to not use from now on, but I’m just rambling. That’s it for this week.