CSU Monterey Bay Learning Journal

What project milestones did you accomplish this week? This week I completed my project. The final implementation added a RAG agent into my AWS Quiz Coach, which is built with React on the frontend and Python with FastAPI on the backend. What is your plan for next week? Next week I plan to continue building on the skills I have developed throughout my time at CSUMB, with a strong focus on AWS cloud services and deepening my cloud knowledge going forward. What challenges, if any, are you currently facing in project development? Do you need instructor assistance? The main challenge throughout this project was time. Balancing two jobs and a daughter with sports practices and games every week made it hard to find long stretches to work. That said, my CSUMB journey is wrapping up and I am looking forward to putting more energy into my career path and working toward becoming a software engineer.

CST438 Week 6 This week's reading covered computing infrastructure and how large scale systems manage servers, containers, and workloads. The concept that clicked most for me was idempotency, the idea that issuing a request twice produces the same result as issuing it once. It sounds simple but it has real implications for building reliable distributed systems, especially when retries are involved. The section on containers versus VMs also connected directly to work I have already done. Deploying my project on AWS using ECS and Docker made the tradeoffs feel concrete rather than theoretical. Containers win on startup time and footprint, but they are not the right tool for everything, particularly around managing state. The serverless model was interesting too. The engineer just provides the code and the platform handles the rest. It removes a lot of overhead but also takes away control, which is a real tradeoff depending on what you are building.

What project milestones did you accomplish this week? This week I completed my project. I integrated RAG into my AWS Cert Quiz app, which now includes an AI agent that explains why a selected answer is wrong and a chat feature that lets users ask follow up questions answered by the documents I fed into the RAG pipeline. What is your plan for next week? Next week I plan to deploy the project on AWS and finish whichever certifications I can before the end of the term. What challenges, if any, are you currently facing in project development? Do you need instructor assistance? No challenges at the moment and no instructor assistance needed.

This week's reading from Software Engineering at Google covered large tests. The main takeaway is that larger tests trade speed and simplicity for fidelity. Unlike unit tests, they test how the system actually behaves in conditions closer to production, which means they catch things unit tests simply cannot. The tradeoff is that they are slower, more expensive to run, and harder to maintain. What stuck with me was that larger tests still use mocks in some cases, and that Google does not rely on full automation scripts for everything. Two key ingredients for large tests to work well are realistic seed data and production data, which makes sense because a test is only as useful as how closely it mirrors real usage.

What project milestones did you accomplish this week? This week I finished 2 certificates and put in over 40 combined hours into the Google Cybersecurity course prior to that. I am on track to finish the Google Cybersecurity certificate by end of this week. What is your plan for next week? Next week I plan to continue studying for the AWS quiz and keep that momentum going. What challenges, if any, are you currently facing in project development? Do you need instructor assistance? No challenges at the moment and no instructor assistance needed.

What project milestones did you accomplish this week? This week was lighter on progress. I did not hit any major milestones but I have a couple of days off coming up that I am dedicating fully to the project, around 8 hours per day. I plan to make up for the slower start before the week is out. What is your plan for next week? Next week's plan is still taking shape depending on how much ground I cover during my days off. I will have a clearer picture of where I stand once I get through those sessions. What challenges, if any, are you currently facing in project development? Do you need instructor assistance? No major challenges right now and no instructor assistance needed. The main thing is just carving out the time, which I have lined up.