This experience is assigned to ICS 613 students only.
On Thursday, February 3, at 7:00am HST, there will be an ACM Tech Talk entitled “Software Engineering at Google” in which senior software engineers at Google discuss their practices for maintaining “arguably the largest codebase ever”. For more details, and to sign up for the talk, register here.
For this experience, please:
In your essay, you should first summarize the key points made in the talk. From the abstract, it appears that Time, Scale, and Tradeoffs will be key themes, but you’ll need to attend the talk to provide more details.
Second, you should provide a perspective on these points. To what extent do you agree or disagree with these points from your own experience? Can you offer examples from your own software development experiences where you encountered the same types of issues discussed in the talk? What did you find to be actionable—what will you do differently in future software development projects as a result of having listened to their experiences?
By the time and date indicated on the Schedule page, write a technical essay regarding this module. You can use the issues above as a starting point, but write a stand-alone essay: don’t just answer them like it’s a homework assignment! Once you’ve finished the essay submit it using Laulima.
Please note the following:
Your submission should be a URL providing a direct link to your essay (not a link to the home page of your portfolio, nor a link to the essays directory page). If the link does not work, you will not get credit for your essay.
An entry for your essay must also appear in the Essays page of your portfolio. Check this before submission. If it is not listed, it’s probably because your YAML front matter is incorrect. See the Essay Content section of the TechFolio documentation for details.
Be sure that your essay is ready for evaluation before submitting it via Laulima. I often click on the link as soon as I receive the submission. If the essay is empty or only partially complete when I click on the link, you might not receive credit.
Your essay must be original content, written during this semester reflecting your current views and writing style. You cannot submit essays that you wrote previously for this assignment. The purpose of this assignment is for you to practice writing right now, this semester.
Do not name your essay “Reflect on…”. Essays with a name like that will get zero credit. Think up a more interesting and appropriate name.
Make sure the file you create to hold your essay does not contain any spaces in the file name. You did it wrong if you see “%20” in the URL to your essay. Essays with spaces in the file names will get zero credit.
For details on essay requirements, see the Technical Essay Style Guide.