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CST 438 - Week 1

I'm back to writing journal entries again! For all my readers who have missed me, it's good to be back.

 Currently, I am taking CST 438, which is the Software Engineering course.

 This week, we learned about the principles of software engineering, SaaS (Software as a Service), RESTful APIs, and wrote a program as an introduction to Spring boot with Java.

 Before taking this class, I was aware of some commonly used software engineering methodologies used today, such as Agile and Waterfall - in fact I believe most of the software development teams at work I know of use Waterfall, while I have heard of other groups in separate divisions following Agile practices. However, I was unaware of other ones such as RUP and Spiral, and I didn't fully understand how SaaS became widespread across the industry.

 After this first week's assignment and reading, I now understand that software engineering is more than just following Agile or Waterfall practices - the industry has changed much since I started using computers in the late 90s, and SaaS took off because of the Internet and how important it is to scale applications or services for a large number of users. Also, I didn't know about large profile failures such as Virtual Case File which were a consequence of not following proper and up to date engineering practices.

 I'm looking forward to learning more about RESTful APIs in the next few weeks and how I can eventually integrate them into future personal projects.

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