What Makes A Product to Be Excellent

   As we just had a wonderful technology feast in the lecture of this week and meanwhile the Facebook seminar assignment had been released to push us to think critically think about Facebook apps, I would like to share my own opinions about what makes a product to be excellent.

   First few words that come to my mind are: concise, fresh and efficient. Look at the consumer electronic market nowadays. It is always the one with concise and convictive design that achieves the big win. Apple is a typical example to show us that how concise and fresh design can destroy the considerations of customers on requiring the high configuration of hardware and follow their hearts to choose the more beautiful one. In fact, the high working efficiency Macs power the users makes Mac even more excellent. Furthermore, when I saw the demonstration of window Surface during the lecture, I was really attracted by its concise design, as well as the very fresh GUI of window 8. This will lead out my opinion on the properties of good software products, which still are concise, fresh and efficient. As I know, many web apps achieve great success because of their fresh, concise and friendly user interfaces, which emphasize the core points of information and omit several trivial ones. This design increases the efficiency of users to obtain information by the app with a relaxed or enjoyable experience. Nice appearance, user-friendly functions and convenience to getting started, those are all what users expect to most of the apps.

Besides the technical aspect, advertising and business model are others points that need to be stressed on making a good product. Apple is still a good example. Still remember the impressive moments of each product-releasing Conference made by Steve Jobs?  The excellent advertising work done by Apple can be sufficiently presented here. In terms of business model, forgive me to use Apple again as an example :D. Unlike other PC companies, Apple restricts the supply channels of their Macs and focuses on setting up authorized retail stores to improve the consuming experience on the users. This will obviously keep a lot of high-end users who consider more about qualities. That is why Mac is so popular even though it has not owned much market share. So for software, especially web apps, these two points are even more important because the intensive competition among web environment makes it much more important than ever to have a good advertisement as well as efficient and effective business mode.

While now, based on our level, good design strategy is still the most important part. So concise, fresh and efficient design is what I pursue now. Hope you all can reach it in some days or make even more excellent web apps which follow your opinion on what an excellent app should be.J

In Doing, We Learn

         The lecture of this week was really interesting because we have two young and excellent guest to give us speeches besides the boring software engineering lecture (I do not really mean that the lecture is boring because I have heard the similar content several times :p ). While beside the planning and organizing methods for software development, what came to my mind most of the time is: In doing, we learn.

         The first speaker showed us the life of him in MIT game lab and briefly introducing the model to organize their development progress by a table-like chart. While other interesting stuffs are that he told us that his team could only play other than pushing themselves in working every day after 5pm. He said that usual people may push them too hard to work day and night for the project in case that they may meet unexpected problems but no time to manage. But this was actually abnormal even it was always this case and if we could follow a good plan then we could manage the work to be balanced every day and relax ourselves in some extent. This was really what he learned when he was in the game development team trying to follow this kind of planning chart. Besides, the second speaker (our excellent senior and tutor!) gave us a typical example. He initially was a guy with little knowledge about computer science but with his efforts and his keeping trying lots of unforeseen things, he could be what he was like now.

         Others’ stories always give us the enlightenment. For my life recently, I really felt that it was what I have tried and practiced that could give me the most favor. For example, the web development, especially design work by using HTML and CSS really need a lot of practice to master, just like what our computer science students have experienced all the time: a lot of coding practice.

         CS3216 is such a good opportunity for us to push ourselves into intensive thinking, learning and practice in both software engineering development aspect and web development aspect. So really appreciate this kind of learning journey and hope we all can persevere in learning and finally gain a huge progress.

Our Awesome First Lecture!

First lecture of CS3216 turned out to be quite interesting with a lot of fun, which made me quite happy and excited to begin my learning journey.

         While first I have to say there are so many talented guys in our class. No matter what kinds of talents, they show that this class is of great vigor, which affected me to be quite energetic in the idle beginning of this semester. Additionally, so many excellent students with various skills really give me a lot of force to learn more and put more efforts into creating my awesome products under the tight schedule. Furthermore, our lecturer Dr. Colin is really a kind man because he almost spoke with a smile from the very beginning to the end of the first lecture :)! Another nice point for our lecturer comparing to Prof Ben is that, his pace when giving us the lecture is really nice. While as we know, Prof Ben always threw out a mass of words very quickly, which made me always tighten my mind and keep focusing during the whole lecture in the past! Haha.... Besides, I could find that our TAs are quite excellent computer science students as they have so much wonderful experience like NOC, company life and so on. So really expect to learn something from them!

         Under the colorful life, there are a lot of efforts to pay to support it. So does our CS3216 journey. I can feel the life has become busy after the first lecture. However, it is not the time to complain about the tough life. It is time to light our passion! Let’s go!

What Do I expect in CS3216

      In the past two years of learning in computer science, I have learnt the algorithm, several programming languages, the principle to develop a software, etc. All of these are the important preparations for developing a real software product. Therefore, now it is time to face to the real challenge.

       I heard from some of my friends who have taken CS3216 before. The very common information among their feedbacks about CS3216 is: painful but substantial. This is actually what I expect. In detail, I hope to learn most of the stuff that are related to develop a real software product. Not just the programming part, but also transform the ideas into product proposal, time scheduling in real software development , advertising for the software, etc.

       Besides, in CS3216 there are two assignments about Facebook and mobile-cloud HTML5, which are both popular topics in Information Technology. So I hope that after my survival from CS3216, I will have a comprehensive understanding about them and probably do whatever I want by playing HTML5 or develop the very interesting and cool Facebook apps to share with my friends.

       Last but not the least, I will meet a lot of excellent course mates, who may be quite awesome in programming and web application development. As a CS student who just learnt no more than 3 years about computer science from zero, I really admire some of my peers who are absolutely experts, geeks or even geniuses in CS. So I hope that in CS3216 I can make some friends like this. Thus I can learn more and improve more.

       All in all, the learning journey in CS3216 should be quite a nice experience in my campus life. Hope that we all can have fun and enjoy this exciting module!