What I think CS3216 is

I haven’t taken the mod, so I can only tell you what I believe it to be. I’ll probably attempt to answer this again at the end of the semester.

I first learnt of CS3216 via NUSWhispers. It sounded super interesting so I found it’s official website and also stumbled onto Prof Ben’s note on Facebook. So my idea of what CS3216 is is some amalgamation of all the above (and some of the emails that were sent out).

And what I’ve gathered is that CS3216 sounds like an exciting, fast-paced module that forces you not only to write quality code, but to focus on developing useful products, and bringing them to market.

What I hope to learn

Coding

I haven’t had formal software engineering experience (haven’t even taken CS2103) so this will be a great chance for me to get up to speed. While this isn’t “just a coding module”, I expect it to involve a heavy amount of coding, and train me to develop quality code under strict deadlines.

And while I’ve been doing Orbital, there wasn’t as much collaboration as I would have hoped. I’m hoping to get some experience with coding in a team setting.

Product Dev

How do you find out what people want? How can you tell whether the project failed because of a crappy idea, or just terrible execution? How do you get users hooked onto your product, and keep them coming back for more? How do you get any users at all?

Hopefully, by the end of the semester, I’ll have a better understanding of how to develop a product all the way from validating an idea to bringing it to market.

Working in a multi-disciplinary team

As I mentioned earlier, I haven’t had much experience working in teams to develop code. But while coders are pretty awesome people, we still need designers and marketers to deliver an amazing product. I hope to meet people outside of computing, learn from them, and learn to work with them.

Last words

I’m both excited and apprehensive. While I did sell myself pretty hard while applying for this module, I do recognise that I’m not a superstar coder (unlike some of my amazing peers). It’ll be a great opportunity to work with some of these giants, and I can only promise to work doubly hard to meet expectations.