Earl Jedidiah Cagaanan

Section 3C - 2002 - INTJ - Self Proclaimed Writer - Back-End Developer

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Big Wrap Up

To start off this week was supposed to be our examination week, with all major subjects scheduled, including Software Design and Engineering (SDE). But get this; our professor presented the class with a proposition: any group that achieved 100% completion on their project would be exempted from the exam. Naturally, the entire class immediately dove into their laptops and papers.

But I felt more conflicted about managing my time between revising our project and preparing for other subjects. While I focused on working on our papers, the rest of the team did their own thing. I really thought that we wouldn't make it in time before the exam. Adding to the pressure, the SDE exam was scheduled for Wednesday, leaving us little time to spare.

The day before the exam, we practically did nothing but sit on our asses working on our projects on the 4th floor of the CEA building for the entire day. Hours passed, and the school grew darker and emptier as we waited for our turn to consult with our professor. We were seventh on the list of groups to present. After our turn, the professor gave us feedback, instructing us to work on chapters 4 and 5, the appendix, and the User Manual video.

But the biggest plot twist was when we received a text from our professor on our gc. Do you know what he said? 

That’s right, I had dumped all of my textbook knowledge on a whim after hearing this. Just by reading this I felt an entire class of hopeless peeps jumping, screaming, crying, and vomiting of joy as they received this almost in the middle of the night. But this meant that we had to work twice as hard to hit 100% completion. For three days, we juggled project work and other examinations.

On Thursday, after finishing our morning exam, we returned to our project. For what felt like eight straight hours, we revised our papers and prepared for our final consultation. This time, our professor pointed out the remaining gaps.

By 7:00 PM, we finally went back to present our completed work. The presentation went smoothly, and by the end, our professor confirmed we had reached 100% completion. We were one of the few groups to finish early, and it felt incredible to know our hard work paid off.

Looking back, I’m immensely grateful. We made it through the semester as project managers and engineers. Thank you to everyone in CPE-3C who had been a huge help, and special thanks to Sir Carl Angelo Suasola for his guidance. May you continue to inspire other students with your resilience and patience as you pursue your master’s.

December 18-19, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 13: Last Class

Today was a big day for our class because of how important this day is. First, we had our final quiz for the subject. I had spent all of yesterday preparing for it, knowing I needed a high score to secure a good grade. When the quiz began, it was nothing like I studied for. So I had trouble from the very first part to the last due to the rigorous amount of problem-solving. However, the day carried more weight because:

This day marked our last class for Software Design and Engineering.

To make it memorable, our professor added a bonus section to the quiz with questions about himself and the subject. One question asked us to describe him in one word, which I’ll keep between us—only he knows what I wrote haha. Another question asked what I’ve learned from the subject so far. I wasn't able to word my answer properly due to time constraints and that I don't have an undo button on my paper. So here’s what I truly meant:

What I truly learned from this subject so far is that you can’t make and manage a project so flawless and feasible without a team and a passion for developing this project. Back in Project Management, I suggested creating a mobile app that could benefit both USTP students and instructors. The idea was an app that can fulfill two goals: providing tutoring for students struggling in certain subjects and offering tutors an additional income stream. This idea became what is now known as EduConnect.

Without a team of passionate developers, we wouldn’t have made it this far, even to this subject. As we worked on developing the app, we gained many practical lessons along the way. Experience, after all, is the best teacher—it’s incredibly rewarding to create something with your own hands.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here to keep this from turning into a full-blown journal entry. But our journey isn’t over yet; we still have to finalize our papers. But for someone as dull, dry and reserved as I am, I’m truly grateful to have learned alongside my groupmates and classmates. Together, we’ve grown—not just as project managers but as aspiring engineers.

December 12, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 12: New Class Activity

So our professor gave us another surprise quiz for a new topic. Nothing unusual happened; it's just that most of my classmates are dumbfounded yet again by this. And there were also some who were late.

Our next topic is all about APIs. The topic provided an overview of APIs, explaining what they are, their significance, how they function, various examples, and the types of APIs, including public, private, partner, and composite. APIs act as connectors, enabling different software systems to exchange data and features. For example, they allow applications to integrate with social media platforms, payment gateways, or weather services.

For our activity, we were tasked to simulate a mobile app where the patient can securely access their medical records via an API linked to a healthcare provider's electronic health record (EHR) system. Our task involved identifying API endpoints, defining HTTP methods, specifying parameters and headers, and implementing security measures to ensure that only the appropriate data was retrieved. Additionally, we created a sequential diagram to map out the process and discussed challenges such as preventing unauthorized access and designing a robust, secure system.

November 21, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

I finally remembered my password...

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering Day 11: New topic for Finals

On the first day of Finals, just when we thought we had everything figured out, our instructor hit us with a surprise pre-test on a topic that had already been posted on the USTEP site—but, of course, no one bothered to read it. Anyway, our first lesson for Finals was all about Software Reliability and Quality Management.

This topic emphasizes the importance of ensuring that software is reliable, performs as intended, and meets high-quality standards impose by ISO 9000. Software reliability is the software’s ability to consistently operate correctly over time, even under varying conditions, without encountering errors or failures. Quality management, however, involves organizing, overseeing, and enhancing the development process to ensure the end product satisfies user requirements and expectations. This process includes activities like testing, debugging, and adhering to industry standards.

November 16, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

PIT Presentation

This week we tried our hardest to cram, code and test our product EduConnect as it is to be presented in class on thursday. Our professor decided to use the remaining time of our class to showcase our PIT, after he was handing out our exam answer sheets. We were the third group to present our PIT and it went very well; we gave our professor a quick demo of signing up on a new account, showcased some features on the front-end, showed how the code works on the back-end, even tested out the accounts and deleting them in Firebase, and manipulating their data.

Our professor told us our PIT is merely 60% complete, which we didn't believe at first. But nevertheless we were satisfied with the outcome of this presentation. Hopefully by finals we are able to develop and implement our project into its full potential.

October 24, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

So uh I finally have my results for my Midterm Exam.

Yay?

Apparently our professor was mildly disappointed that none of us got to the passing score. He elaborated further he tried his full best to have a single one of us pass the exam. He also guessed that some didn't try to put any effort into solving that question from the exam, which was the SUS score problem. He pointed out that this might be the reason why no one had a passing score; some clearly didn't try to solve it and just simply shaded the letter of one of the possible answers.

October 24, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 7-8: Midterm Exams closing in and more announcements

On September 26, our instructor canceled our face-to-face class. Instead, he uploaded some activities, the final lecture for our midterm, and guidelines for our PIT. We were also reminded to turn in our consultation forms.

The following week, on October 3, we had Quiz 1 covering software testing. Quiz 2 was conducted online, but we faced issues accessing it because USTEP's incredibly half-baked server was experiencing some traffic. I forgot why it happened but almost the entire class had lost their marbles over it. Thankfully, our instructor helped us sort out the issue and reminded us to complete the quiz on time to avoid similar server problems with USTEP in the future.

In my case, I was answering the Quiz 2 perfectly fine until I got caught on by the traffic. I was just about to click 'submit', then the website started acting up; I was waiting for the website to change or even show that I had submitted the quiz on time. Later I sent a private message to my professor about this and asked if my score was recorded. My professor went to check it but I didn't receive any updates from him yet. So I just assumed my Quiz 2 was a success.

I talk to myself that the Midterm Exam is approaching swiftly as I was staring into a wall during a different class that day. It felt like it had only been a month since classes started. Like I barely understood some of the subtopic and everything felt too fast. With a cup of coffee in my hand I was ready to cram everything up.

I hope I'm ready for what's about to come, because even then I still feel unconfident of my abilities as a learner.

I hope all for the best.

September 26, 2024 - October 3, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 6: Group Activities in One Day

Our instructor introduced us to another topic called Software Testing and Quality Assurance. We learned about different testing methods like Black Box and White Box Testing, and John Brooke's System Usability System (SUS). Our instructor also discussed Regression Testing, which checks if changes in the software create new problems, and System Testing, which ensures that the whole program works properly before release. I had to admit that I was lost half at the discussion since it was a lot longer but we managed to end the discussion just an hour before the class dismisses.

After that we had a group activity where we try to analyze UI (User Interface) problems. Our task was to simply look for inconsistencies at the design of the UI. All we did was to point out and take note of our findings.

Another group activity we did was solving the SUS with responses from 3 participants through Google forms and google spreadsheets. We added up all the scores, divided them by 3 (since there were 3 participants), and this gave us the average score, showing how usable the system was overall. Though we had to submit our Google forms a bit late because of how difficult it was to manage writing, encoding with a very slow internet. But at the end of class we did our best and we were able to pass our forms through our group chat.

September 19, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 5: First Quiz

Today, we had our Quiz 1, which covered Software Design patterns and some fundamental skills of a software engineer. Frankly I didn't study well so i had trouble answering some questions that looked like it didn't came from the materials provided by our professor. What I did was i matched each problem scenario to the most suitable design pattern.

But I hope to push myself to read intently so I can actually answer my quizzes in an easy way

September 12, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 4: Group Activity

For this day we tackled on a new topic called Software Design. I have to admit I was lost on the topic because i didn't expected the document to be worth 100 pages. I did set a goal to study this by myself although it didn't help at the fact I still felt drowsy reading all of this, and eventually got bored.

After our discussion, we moved on to a group activity by counting off from one to four to form groups. All we have to do was to design a system for a restaurant that allows customers to make reservations online. Using my experience and genius intellect, I design our top view restaurant reservation system along with some of my groupmates. But unfortunately, we only had an hour to do so, so I couldn't polish our design and left it unfinished to be submitted by 3:00pm. Not to mention the WiFi here is just horrendous; I couldn't properly use Canva.

September 5, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 3: First Consultation

Our Instructor had just announced that he won't be having classes with us today but he'll make use of all of our time instead for consultation. Now this is where we have to show him the progress of our project (note that this project was initiated in our previous subject, as the current subject is simply a prerequisite for the one before it.)

August 29, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 2: First Topic Class

Now we actually have started our first lesson in Software Design and Engineering, which is about the introduction to software engineering.

Frankly speaking, this was going to be my first career choice before I even went to Senior High. But researched about this and I found out they don't offer this particular major here, atleast in Mindanao.

Bummer.

Anyways the discussion went pretty well. But the thing that took my interest my most was the subtopic about different Software Development Tools. Mainly because I know some of us had already tried alot of these before in our previous subjects. I am really interested in programming, then my eyes lit up a bit as I was writing this because I realized I hadn't have much time to experiment on my own. I would say that my skill in coding became stagnant.

After the discussion we also had a group activity with my classmates. We were tasked to review and analyze our chosen paper; ours was about a wilderness weather station. It was really hard to to this under an hour as we needed to create our presentation on Canvas. We split up the work and I was the one who tried to find the Software engineering principles applied in that paper. An hour later, we presented our amateur at best, half-baked presentation with only a single representative to report. I would say ours went very well even there were missing panels in that Canvas project.

We were also tasked by our instructor to record our progress through another software. For our group, we used Trello as our software. I'm still still getting the hang of it. Hopefully I could master all the different software required for our project since I'm left with a challenging task as a back-end developer

August 22, 2024

[earlcagaanansde]

CPE312- Software Design and Engineering

Day 1: Orientation

New class, new beginning—oh joy

My lifeline is barely beating at this point, but I'm still kicking it at USTP. So I guess it's time to summon whatever scraps of energy I have left just to scrape by another year. Got up at the crack of dawn, made it to campus, and proceeded to warm a chair all day at the E-library like I always do since the day I discovered this heavenly safe space.

Then I went to class, everything was going as normally as expected until our professor decided to spice things up with a little 'introduce yourself and tell us your favorite song' icebreaker. Naturally, I said my favorite was Here With Me by d4vd, even though I was frantically searching my brain as I had many obscure, non-socially-acceptable type of music.

After that we dove into the course's objectives, requirements, and the grading system. We even recited the student pledge (I was the only one who knew what was happening in that class as I already did this in one of his classes.)

So yeah, this class? Totally going to give it my all not just because of how demanding this subject is but also how much my instructors are expecting actual effort from us. Guess there’s no room for slacking this time. It's time I take this seriously for my future.

August 16, 2024