School: Software Engineering

Over the past year and a half, I've taking masters classes in Software Engineering at the University of St. Thomas. The initial goal of taking the classes was to expand my knowledge in not only helping me fill in some of the develpment gaps of being self taught, but also expand my knowledge about the process and best practices of software development. Since I have been doing work mainly for ad agencies and marketing departments, it has given me an interesting perspective on software development in other industries by both the content of the classes and the people who I've met along the way.

Foundations of Software Development

The first class that I took the fall of 2008 was a Foundations of Software Development class where I was able to program in Java for the first time. The first third of the class was going through the basics of coding. This included very simple concepts like methods, variables, arrays, etc and eventually transformed into more advanced concepts like multi-dimensional arrays and basic objects. This prepared us for the next part of the class which introduced linked lists, concepts of recursion, stacks, queues, different types of trees and the concept of O notation. The final part of the class introduced heaps, advanced tree alogorhythms along with graphs and and hash tables. Most of these concepts we reproduced in weekly assignments, however some were simply introductions to these concepts which were very useful in my second class, Software Engineering.

Software Engineering

Winter 2009, the class I took was in Software Engineering. The purpose of this class was to learn certain concepts of the process of software development including analysis, data modeling, software estimation, and software testing. There was also a group project that went hand in hand with the content of the class and utilized some of the data structures and alogrithms that we learned in my foundations class. This group project gave us hands on experience with the contents of what we were learning in the class and, in my opinion was the most interesting part of the class.

For our group project, we were to create an application based on a style of programming called Genetic Programming. Genetic programming is a system that computer programs can automatically evolve according to the experiences the system learned by training data provided to the system. We built a learning alogorithm that is similar to DNA evolution by the genetic evolutionary concepts of crossover, mutation and cloning to learn from itself and try to solve a problem. We were able to use the new concepts that I had learned in my foundations class to do this including using binary trees to hold and manipulate the data, recursion to sort through the data and were able to apply the O notation to design a solution to increase the performance of the application.

Object-Oriented Application and Design

In the fall of 2009, I took an Object-Oriented Application and Design class which really focuesd on Object Oriented Analysis, software design, patterns, UML tools and documentation. There was a group project in this class which also corolated with the content of the class. Though the idea for the project was relatively simple, the requirements were that we had to go through all of the proper steps for analysis and design and we had to have a minimum of 20 classes. We ended up creating an mp3 player audio/visualizer in actionScript/Flash called the AudioTron music visualizer. The app (and source code) can be downloaded here ( www.audiotronplayer.com). Not only was the application a blast to make, but my documentation for this application was outstanding."