One course is over; more are to come

This week is the last week for CS169.2x class, offered through edX. I am very glad that I took this class (including CS169.1x before). It was a very intensive adventure, and particularly useful as it created an opportunity for hands-on exercises and pair programming with people from all over the world; an opportunity to learn about Agile software development, legacy code and other tips and tricks that are often missed in a purely academic environment.

There was some time spent on how to read, analyze and refactor legacy code, and I consider this to be one of the most useful parts of the course. On this note, I'd like to mention the railroady gem, which allows to create simplified Unified Modeling Language class diagrams in order to analyze the the relationships among the most important classes and attributes. I think it is a good gem to use in one's own code at some point - for an inexperienced developer, it can be so easy to get tangled up in classes and relationships. Railroady gem might just be the tool to help get your head out of the mess.

It is sad to see an adventure to have come to an end, but there are more just around the corner. I plan on continuing to enhance my education through online courses, and the next one is coming up through Coursera - Web Application Architectures. Compared to CS169, it might be a step down in terms of complexity of the material, but repetition is the mother of all learning. I am also looking forward to Introduction to Functional Programming, a new course offered through edX. The course uses Haskell, and it'll be fun to learn it.

It will be great to see any CS169 classmates in these and other courses.