CSUMB Learning Journal

 This week I learned about large tests from the textbook. This also went into when, where, and why you would use larger tests sometimes as compared to smaller tests and weighs the pros and cons of both. The things that stood out to me the most in this chapter were the sections talking about unfaithful doubles and issues with configurations causing bugs and not being caught because they sometimes aren't including in the version control system with the rest of the project code. Interestingly, the textbook claims that configuration changes is one of the major reasons for major outages at Google.

Q. What is the most interesting thing you have learned in your reading of "Software Engineering at Google"? A. I think it's interesting how Google does code reviews. I didn't expect that they would tag approved changes with something kind of silly like LGTM which stands for "looks good to me", but it does make sense and seems quite practical in use. It's also cool to learn that Google uses an in-house code reviewing tool, Critique, since I haven't heard of it before.

Q. Describe what are the good points about using Git for source code management. A. Git is a good version control system. Everyone gets their own copy of the project which adds extra redundancy in case the main version gets deleted. Git allows you to create branches to keep the main branch of the project clean while developers work on new code. As a version control system it prevents your projects from getting messed up or corrupted. Q. What are possible problems that Git merge does not solve when merging code from different developers? A. Git merges do not take context into consideration. 

Q. Summarize what you learned about React this week. A. I learned that React uses the two-server model where you have a separate front-end and back-end. The React front-end is just a fancy way of sending API requests to the back-end that actually does everything. Q. In your opinion, what are the strengths and weaknesses of React? A. I think one strength is React's component based architecture. It's easy to organize and manage different components of your project. I think one weakness is that it can be difficult to set up and configure the application to get it working properly. That might have just been an issue exclusive to my experience though.

Q. What did you expect a course in Software Engineering would cover? A. I believed we'd be building desktop applications with graphical user interfaces. Q. After completing week 1, how has your opinion changed? A. It turns out we're working on web services instead. I think that my personal preference toward desktop apps over web-based ones, especially regarding sensitive information and potential security concerns, is why I had the wrong initial impression.