Well, the first year of Professional Software Development at Swinburne just finished. Overall, I thought it was quite an enjoyable experience. The course content so far has been very interesting, with the exception of Usability and Enterprise Technologies and Architectures.

Some notes on this semester’s exams:

Usability: Ugh. I hated this exam for several reasons. Firstly it is a very long exam (three hours of solid work). Secondly, all of the questions are weighted the same, which doesn’t make much sense when some parts of the course are more important than other bits (which is the whole purpose of weighting). Another thing, the case study was pretty shoddy. It was software to be used to manage clothes in a wardrobe. C’mon. Even if Apple made the user interface, nobody is going to use a computerised system to catalogue their wardrobe.

Computer Systems: This exam was not bad.  The length was good*, I had finished the exam in about two hours, giving me an hour to go through and find my stupid mistakes. The only thing that disappointed me was how little it focused on shell scripting. I was quite stressed about shell scripting in the leadup to the exam since we had spent a whole .. two weeks learning it. However, the script we had to write was trivial. All the time I spent fussing about how anal the Bash shell is with whitespace, I could have spent getting to know PIC16 assembler better. Oh well, the assembler was fairly straight forward anyway.

Internet Technologies: In a word, long*. The exam was straight-forward, especially given we had a summary sheet for XHTML and CSS. The only problem was it took ages to write out the XHTML for the form we were given. Coding XHTML by hand is tedious, and you end up with a really sore hand afterwards*.

Object-Oriented Programming: I think my portfolio presentation went well. The only bastard was that I couldn’t include a podcast… I started work on a podcast which was going to be a demonstration of developing an object-oriented solution in C# from the design phase to the development and testing. However, I couldn’t get my screen capture software to record properly (mainly sound sync and codec issues). This was a bit unfortunate*, but I think the rest of the documentation in my portfolio definitely covers the learning outcomes so it should be all good.

Now I’m looking forward to about 13 weeks of nothingness. It should be excellent. I’m planning on blogging more this holidays. I know I’ve said that time and time again, but I think I can commit to it now. Maybe.

–Ben
Now Playing: Gary Numan – Cars

* – That’s What She Said.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Life. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.