May 30, 2012
by Debbie
6 Comments
This week thousands(?) of online students will be finishing Udacity’s CS253 Web Application Engineering course by building a wiki for the blog they have created. Unfortunately I will not be one of them. The course was run by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and involved coding a blog in Python using Google App Engine. I was hesitant about signing up because of the amount of time I had needed each week to complete CS101: Building A Search Engine. Udacity however, changed their homework grading policy from one with hard deadlines to a system where you can make as many submissions as it takes to get it right (even after the solution video is posted). This policy change was what prompted me to try another course.
There were a couple of other choices in subjects: CS212 Design of Computer Programs and CS262 Programming Languages but Web Application Engineering looked the most interesting because I wanted to learn how a website interacted with it’s database. All three courses had the same prerequisite: ‘previous programming experience, comparable to what is covered by the Udacity CS101 course’. So I thought I would be fine. Continue Reading →