Last post for last CS316

Life is short. All of a sudden, another semester has come to the end and so is this awesome module. Everything is still so fresh and vivid as if they just happened yesterday.

At the beginning of this course, I barely expected to gain some experience of working in a team. However, after the three seemingly impossible projects, I learned far more than what I expected.

First of all, I picked up a lot of technical skills such as PHP, JS, SQL, JS, HTML5, Facebook APIs and so on. But this is nothing to be proud of. What’s really valuable is the experience to study most of the knowledge outside lectures and read a lot of documentation. The main difficulty about self-learning is usually not that we cannot find an answer; it is that there are just too many answers and a lot of them are inappropriate and redundant. As a result, I had to distinguish those that are more likely to work from a mass of search results. I have to say self-learning is one of the most practical skills I obtain from this module.

Another important lesson I had is difference between ideas and problems. As a computer science student, I know nothing about business. To make things worse, business is actually the last thing in the world I’ll be interested in. I’d like doing something cool and challenging but maybe impractical rather than something boring but truly solve problems. However, life is different and good ideas usually are not going to success, as Prof. Ben said. This is why our initial proposal for the final project was rejected. We did some research after the proposal meeting. We talked to some business runners and tried to sell our idea and only received failure. This was when we woke up from our dreams and realized the differences. Although I still have no interest in business, now I look at ideas in a different way: a good idea should solve some real problems and thus have its real users, not solving problems we imagine.

Of course, I had a lot of precious experience working as a team member. At first, I have no idea what it is like to work with other persons and how to make something that has real users. This is a new continent to me. The happiness of gaining teamwork experience is nothing less than that of Columbus when he discovered America.

I also had some projects for other modules but they were not as fun as CS3216 projects. I think one of the reasons is in CS3216, we have more freedom to choose the topic and thus everyone was enthusiastic. Another reason is we didn’t have much time for every CS3216 project. Stress sometimes is very helpful. It Keeps me concentrate and productive and doubles the happiness and satisfaction when I complete a task, no matter how trivial it is.

However, it is really sad and a pity that we are the last batch of CS3216. This module is awesome and is definitely one of the ironic modules of NUS. We probably won’t find it anywhere else across the world.