SPO600 Course Wrap Up

We're at the end of the course! This felt like a really long course, but very interesting and fun. Throughout all of my years at Seneca I never really got to interact close to the hardware level, and this course finally allowed me to. I can finally say I've programmed in assembly language!

Overall, I found this course extremely difficult, I'd listen to the lecture in class, look at the lab briefly and kind of just close the window. The labs themselves were pretty challenging and required us to look up a lot of stuff as well as reading other people's blogs if we were stuck to get an idea of how to proceed. Which isn't that much different from the real world when we do get stuck. I recall setting aside a whole weekend just to do the weekly labs.

As a student who only learned the basics of C for a semester as an introductory course, trying to understand the C code being used or talked about in class was also challenging. That coupled with the fact that our project selections were recommended to be in the C language also made it extremely hard, as I'm assuming most of the libraries are written by people who are very fluent in C. Trying to read the code is kind of like deciphering a language we barely know.

All this isn't to say I didn't enjoy the course, it was quite the opposite. I don't think I've found another course aside from this(SPO600) or OSD600 where I decided to spend so much time on it. Our professor, Chris Tyler was amazing, with lots of professional experience and also keeps himself up to date with the industry. During the project phase of the course he'd show us possible optimizations for libraries every week as he knew quite a bit of us were frustrated on trying to find one. He also tried help remove any roadblocks we encountered by tackling them in class.

I'm a little disappointed and sad I wasn't able to find an optimization for my project Redis, as I thought it would've been pretty cool to put it on the resume for potential employers and also the fact that we're using Redis as part of an internal project for the school. It was fun though doing instrumentation and profiling on Redis and analyzing the results to see if my changes improved the run time of SET operations.

Lastly, I'd like to thank Professor Tyler for teaching this course and also spending time on analyzing the results of the profiling and instrumentation of my project!