The class was alright. I wasn't a fan of how it was structured, however. Keep in mind that it might change as the prof develops it more.

For Spring 23 with Dobra, the entire course revolved around the semester-long project in which you have to work with 3 others to create a web application. Ideally, you would have two group members working on the front-end (i.e., how it looks and works for a user, using angular) and two members working on the back-end (handling the database and web requests, using golang). The project's actual purpose is to teach us how to work on a project as a group without stepping on each other's toes. The issue then, is that the lectures do not pertain to how to do this. You will be teaching yourself Angular and Golang, as well as using GitHub to do version management. The grading system for the project was split up into checkpoints called Sprints. These were every 2 weeks, then every 4 weeks later o...read more

On the first day of class, he said that lectures were totally optional, so I never went to or watched another one after that. But from what I gathered on that first day, he is a businessman running some software startup that has garnered some success. He teaches the course on the side, giving us some insight into the actual software engineering world. I didn't really like the guy since he seemed kind of full of himself.

Try to make a group with people you know, or otherwise hope for good group members. Communication is key, so don't be shy about telling your group mates to get their s**t together and do their part. If you do it right, you should only have to work on your respective part of the project and not do other people's work. Lastly, the course is not about writing code, its about getting code to work. We had the green light from the prof to use ChatGpt or use other means to get code without writing it. The less code you manually write, the better.

No exams or quizzes. Workload is pretty light. I didn't need to put that much time into this course aside from the semester long group project. The first project is individual and involves contributing to an open source project. Highly recommend picking one that seems extremely easy because they can get super confusing. Then you have a group project and if you get a good group it shouldn't be too bad. Thankfully there was someone in my group that already had an internship and understood a lot about software engineering because this class alone wouldn't have prepared me enough. There's also a semester long research project which is just an infographic and is really easy.

To be honest I felt like the actual substance of this course wasn't there. It was more about the process of software engineering and not how to actual DO any software engineering. The class/content was organized fine but I don't think it really helped me that much to become a better software engineer. She says it's not a coding class (ie she won't teach you how to code anything) but I think coding demos to put what she was talking about in context would've been helpful.

She had a very positive demeanor and seemed nice. Offers some extra credit as well.