CS 467 Blog by Louis Hwang

Blog Post #3

This entry will be a SWOT analysis of CS 467. This will talk about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the course.

Strengths: The main strength of this course is the opportunity it provides to work with other students on a project throughout the term. I felt this was the main strength because most of the time as online students we generally just work on projects and assignments by ourselves and only interact with others when we have questions or need to collaborate on certain group projects. Being able to work with others to overcome several challenges throughout the term was the main strength from taking this course.

Weaknesses: I felt that the course doesn’t necessarily teach the technical skills necessary to undertake certain projects. For example, there were many machine learning or game development projects that I was interested in joining, but since I knew nothing about working in those fields, I felt it was safest for me to work with Python programming projects since that was what I knew best. Although we had a mentor to help with some guidance, I understood that they were not there to teach us technical skills that a regular course does.

Opportunities: If the course gave more incentives in the beginning for me to work on a project in a field that I had no experience in, then I believe the course would be much more meaningful for me. But since this course is online and students only meet with each other occasionally, then I understand that this is probably the best that can be offered.

Threats: The only threat I could think of was if a certain group had any unresponsive group members or if the mentor was not available for most of the term. This also applies to any online course in general. But for this term, I thought my group members were excellent and my overall experience was better than I had expected. Therefore, I consider myself fortunate to not have to deal with this threat that I just described.

Blog Post #2

My favorite technology from the project has been using Google Cloud to load and store stock data. I have never used Google Cloud previously, so being able to use this makes the project more exciting for me. I learned how to write code in Python to load stock data from the database as well as to store stock data into my group’s Google Cloud database. Being able to do this allows me to work on something that may be applicable in the real world.

Google Cloud is used for data storage and cloud computing. This means that data is stored on its cloud platform and then can be used for other purposes such as in an application. For my team’s project, we used Google Cloud to store the stock prices from 1985 to the present year and then have our Python algorithms load the data from the database, do some calculations, and then store the result into another part of the database. Once the result is stored, our application can then show the relevant information based on the data that was stored in Google Cloud.

Google Cloud technology could be made better by being more user friendly, especially for newer users. At first, I had to do many online searches to find out how to get everything set up, with the steps including downloading the Google SDK Shell, running some commands and making sure the loading of data works in my Python code. But once I set everything up, I feel that this technology is not too difficult to use in the programs that I am writing.

Blog Post #1

I began studying computer science almost one year ago by enrolling at Oregon State University. I wanted to get into this field because I felt I could do well in a technical career. Currently, I have two quarters left until I graduate from OSU, and my plan now is to pursue a master’s degree in computer science and obtain a position in government. I have an upcoming internship with a federal agency that I hope to begin this summer before I begin my master’s degree.

So far at OSU, I have managed to maintain a 4.0 GPA, and I hope I can continue to maintain that until graduation. Before studying at OSU, I only had limited programming experience. I believe I was able to succeed because of my ability to work hard and understand all the material presented in the courses. I also work as a teaching assistant for CS 271 Computer Architecture & Assembly Language starting from April 2023 to the present day, and I feel this work experience was very beneficial to me at OSU.

I’m most fluent in Python because most of the assignments that I have done at OSU have been completed with Python. I have also learned to use C and other technologies introduced in web development. For this reason, I hope I can work on a project involving writing algorithms using Python. I am also interested in some of the machine learning projects that this course offers, but since I have limited experience and am taking three courses this quarter, I am unsure if I will be able to learn everything from scratch. I hope that this course will provide enough guidance for me to work through a project without having much prior experience other than through coursework.