Analysing student Software Engineering projects metadata

CS2103/T is the introductory software engineering module in the National University of Singapore. I took this module in AY16/17 Semester 1, from August to November 2016. For the last seven weeks of the module, students were required to construct a todo list application in teams of three, four or in one instance, two. Students were strongly encouraged to fork their projects off an existing address book application created by the teaching team, and repurpose that codebase into a todo list app.

So you want to take CS3216?

You probably shouldn’t - here are the reasons why and why not, and what you might want to learn before

On the Proper Care and Feeding of REST APIs, Part II

In the first part of this article we introduced the choice of tools used to build our API. In this second part I’ll go into the details of how we used these tools, what challenges we faced, and how we overcame them.

Angular 2 is terrible

We used Angular 2 for our frontend. I was not involved in this decision, and I came to work on the frontend relatively late in the project. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive review of the framework, but rather a collection of observations after using it for a little more than two weeks. I don’t claim that using it for two weeks makes me an expert, and welcome any corrections, but for what it’s worth, I consider using Angular 2 one of the biggest mistakes for our project.

On the Proper Care and Feeding of REST APIs - Part I

After working the full-stack for assignment 1, and purely on the frontend for assignment 3, for the final project I get the exciting task of designing and building a backend API from scratch to power the two frontends of our final project product. I’ve only ever constructed APIs twice before, and both times with toy projects that had at most one or two endpoints. This on the other hand is significantly bigger - for the first week of the project, by GitHub’s estimation, our project repository had more API documentation than code!

Assignment 1 and 3 Post Mortem

These are the highlights of things I’ve learnt from the last seven weeks of CS3216. I have meant to do a post-mortem after assignment 1, but Assignment 3 and school got in the way, so instead here’s a 2-in-1 deal - a post mortem of both assignments 1 and 3.

HTML5 APIs: An Overview

A brief summary of the HTML5 APIs available for use in your assignment 3 project.

Slack: The Seminar: The Review

This is a critique of Slack, as well as a critique of a critique of Slack. Slack is a the popular instant messaging and team communications software launched in 2013 and quickly grown to prominence as one of the fastest growing startup, boasting one million users and a valuation of over a billion US dollars in less than two years since its launch.