CS373 Spring 2021: William Wang

Me.

Hi, my name is William and I’m excited to be taking CS373: Software Engineering this spring. I’ve lived in Austin my whole life and graduated from Westlake High School, where I enjoyed doing technical projects and programming contests with the computing club. Indeed, computer science has always intrigued me; I love learning about the latest tech, reasoning about the underlying theory, building things that are sometimes useful and always fascinating.

Today, I’m studying CS and math in UT’s Turing Scholars program, which I chose based on its rigorous courseload and vibrant community. I’ve since written thousands of lines of code in languages from C to Python, but I’ve yet to experience any design challenges on a truly large scale, especially involving teams of people and diverse codebases. In CS373, I hope to better understand the key issues in such a process: What techniques and technologies exist to streamline development? How are group projects divided and managed? What makes code robust? efficient? scalable?

Our first week of class has looked really promising to this end. I appreciate the cold-calling feature, which definitely keeps me on my toes while not adding too much pressure if I don’t exactly know the answer. I think working through an explanation as we’ve been doing is a great way of learning a concept deeply, and I’m excited for the rest of the semester.

Tip of the week: To remove sticky burned bits from a cast iron skillet, boil some water in it and scrape with a wooden spoon. If problem persists, scrub with salt and paper towels.