CST 489 - Final Journal Entry!!

Final Reflection

Looking back at two years of journals, the first thing that stands out is how much the writing itself changed. Early entries from CST300 read like someone still figuring out how to balance waking up at 3am for work, studying, and being a dad. There were schedules mapped out by the hour. A lot of honesty about struggling with time management. By the end of CST489, those same constraints were still there, two jobs and a daughter with a full sports schedule, but the tone shifted. Less survival, more momentum.

The technical growth is easier to trace. I went from debugging basic Java methods and learning how to use a debugger properly in CST338, to deploying a full stack application on AWS using ECS, ECR, RDS, and S3. The capstone project was something I actually built from scratch and am proud of, a RAG-powered AWS Quiz Coach with a React frontend and a Python FastAPI backend with an AI agent that explains your wrong answers. That is not a project I could have conceived, let alone built, at the start of this program.

A few things from the curriculum stuck more than I expected. The code review chapter from Software Engineering at Google changed how I think about pull requests at work. The Git week in CST438 felt redundant at first since I already use it at Keasy, but the point about a clean merge not meaning working code was a good reminder. Large scale testing, cloud infrastructure, Agile vs Waterfall, all of it has context now that it did not before.

The service learning course was probably my biggest frustration. I came in hoping to do real dev work using my C++ background and spent most of it reading documentation and navigating an IRC channel. But even that taught me something about how open source projects actually operate, which is mostly patience and documentation.

What comes next is finishing the AWS certification and doubling down on cloud. The CSUMB program gave me the foundation. The goal now is to turn that into a full time software engineering role and keep building.

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