It is so encouraging to read people’s final blog. Everybody learns A LOT from this course. Still remember the sentence Prof Ben told us in the first lecture? What does not kill you makes you stronger. Now, we all survived and we all did a fabulous job in delivering the application. Congrats!

The same as cs1101s, Prof Ben’s last lecture is always the best lecture, cause it is not rocket science but LIFE.

What have we learnt?

1. HTML, PHP, CSS, Ajax, ActionScript, SQL, Mysql, Flex, Microsoft Visual Studio, WPF

Four month ago, I knew absolutely nothing about them. Now I can use them to create something. The more important thing behind these acronyms is the courage and ability to learn new things. It dose not matter how experienced you are in programming. For everything that you need to learn, just learn it. It’s no big deal.

2. Project plan and teamwork

For the first project, my team did not deploy a fully functional application because we did not plan well in advance. Our dream was too big while our ability and time was very limited. Nevertheless, we learnt from that and applied the lesson to our final project. Entity, bean, service, logic layer, presentation layer, seems we have already covered many topic of my future courses.

After a proper plan, execution is the key step to GET THINGS DONE. Here, I must thanks my dearest team members. Without you, I could do nothing. It’s all right we are all freshmen. It’s also OK none of us knows anything about web programming. No matter how steep the learning curve could be, we can conquer that for sure.

3. Networking or fluffy

For every problem I could not Google a solution, we will try every possible way for help. Tutor, senior, PHD, friends, maybe the next call will give you some clue towards the solution. Actually, Zheng Yang, the person who contributed a lot effort in our project, was met in accident. I just explained the problem and did not expect any breaking idea. Later, it turned out that he became an unofficial team member and stayed overnight with us for many days. Don’t believe? It’s true.

Despite the people around us, those who are far away in China also offer lots help. Xiaonei engineers were very kind and help during the authorization and post-authorization of our application. For some xiaonei bugs we reported, they solved them very quickly. The same as our application, xiaonei platform is still young. There may exist some problems but things are getting better day-by-day. Here I also want to thank our twelve thousands users for trying My Campus. The application itself is still very basic. We have many plans for it and we need more time to implement them. For the 3000 universities that do not in our application for now, we will add them once we finish our final exams.

All in all, networking is not that hard. Computer science students can do it well. The only thing to remember is to make friends with your boss, make friends with your clients and be sincere.

How do we a difference?

We make a difference on ourselves. One sentence I said in the first lecture was “ I know nothing now but I hope I can make something when I finish this course.” I fulfill my wish and I believe everybody shares the same feeling with me.

We make a difference on some one around us. It is very encouraging to hear form my friends that they wish to take this course given that they already know how many times we saw the sunrise while doing the project. Everything is possible. All you need is a little bit courage and effort.

Don’t work

Agree, and one more sentence, don’t study. When I was taking the theory test for my driving license, everybody in my testing group majored in management except me. Does China really have so many people to manage? Some parents would be very proud if their children study a popular major but what is the point in that? Can law, medicine, bioengineering guarantees a happy life? Some of my juniors are still worrying about course difficulty, teaching quality, job opportunity and average salary when choosing a major. Actually, they do not need to care about those figures unless they admit they are mediocre.

There is always a choice,

And you don’t know what comes next. For the final project pitching party, I did not prepare anything to pitch initially. However, on the spot, I caught the gut to introduce Xiaonei platform and it turned out to be a very popular topic on that day. What’s more surprising. It gave birth to my first business in life. My tutor was a little bit worried because the contract is due at the same time with my final exam. It’s OK. I can handle that and I really don’t know what will come next.

Final words

Great thanks to Prof Ben, CS3216 tutors, CS3216 students, Zheng Yang, Feng Xuanti, Su Zhan, James, Chun Lin, Zi Han, Xiaonei development team, My Campus users and who help us throughout the whole process.