MIS 3501 Data-Centric Application Development
MIS 3501 data-centric application development was the second professional course I took when I became a MIS major student in 2015 fall. Before the course started, I have heard that this course would highly focus on hands-on programming ability. It was not an “easy” course from my colleges’ words.
At the first class of the semester, professor Shafer mentioned the course structure and the aspect he deemed important. During the semester, we learned PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS. All these programming languages were around the core knowledge- data-centric application development. Ultimately, we need to integrate information into our temporary database. At the end of the semester, there was a final extra point project. In the final project, we need to integrate all skills I have learned from the class, based on Eliza AI robot template. I tried to create a survey which was asking international students their academic performance and social life quality. Since there were many international students at Temple University, the survey would assist administrative staff to know those students well. However, I did not successfully import the information I got from the survey. There were some problems showed up when I tried to import the information. So far, I could not figure out a better way to solve the problem.
Although I failed the final project, I did learn a lot from creating the software from scratch by myself. During the semester, there were some opportunities for us to write our own code. However, most of the projects were not required to build the software from the scratch. Thus, when I tried to create my own stuff, I faced many unpredictable bugs and issues. Sometimes I could solve them well but sometimes not. When the project stocked, I would search possible solutions from the Internet and ask the professor. I gained precious knowledge which was not taught in the course.
With the knowledge of using several programming languages in one software, finding possible solutions from the Internet, and asking professor and classmates, I have learned that each software product, no matter how simple as it looks like, some people did spend a lot of time to create it. Also, throughout the semester, I discovered that my train of thinking became much clearer because code-writing needs a clear logic in order to make the program run smoothly. Coding is not an extremely hard thing to do, the only requirement to create a successful program is patience. Patience on thinking, patience on debugging.