Professor Alin Dobra Reviews
Class Ratings
Prof: Alin Dobra / Spring 2021
Sep 19, 2021
Great lectures and grade was completely based on 6 coding assignments
Class Ratings
Professor Rating
Prof: Alin Dobra / Spring 2023
May 15, 2023
The class was alright. I wasn't a fan of how it was structured, however. Keep in mind that it might change as the prof develops it more.
For Spring 23 with Dobra, the entire course revolved around the semester-long project in which you have to work with 3 others to create a web application. Ideally, you would have two group members working on the front-end (i.e., how it looks and works for a user, using angular) and two members working on the back-end (handling the database and web requests, using golang). The project's actual purpose is to teach us how to work on a project as a group without stepping on each other's toes. The issue then, is that the lectures do not pertain to how to do this. You will be teaching yourself Angular and Golang, as well as using GitHub to do version management. The grading system for the project was split up into checkpoints called Sprints. These were every 2 weeks, then every 4 weeks later o...read more
On the first day of class, he said that lectures were totally optional, so I never went to or watched another one after that. But from what I gathered on that first day, he is a businessman running some software startup that has garnered some success. He teaches the course on the side, giving us some insight into the actual software engineering world. I didn't really like the guy since he seemed kind of full of himself.
Try to make a group with people you know, or otherwise hope for good group members. Communication is key, so don't be shy about telling your group mates to get their s**t together and do their part. If you do it right, you should only have to work on your respective part of the project and not do other people's work. Lastly, the course is not about writing code, its about getting code to work. We had the green light from the prof to use ChatGpt or use other means to get code without writing it. The less code you manually write, the better.