Alexander Beletsky's development blog

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CS101 Building a Search Engine: Week 7 and Final Exams

As I said in my previous post, last several units of CS101 were a little tought. Not so difficult, but it made me a little worry what’s it gonna be in final exams. Being posted right in time, I had to conclude Unit 7 before I start with exams. That time, I had some doubts if I’m able to meet course deadline.

Fortunatelly, Unit 7 was non-technical one. I went throught it rather quickly. Some scenes for this unit were taken in Compute History Museum. This place is just amazing, I wish I had a chance to visit it someday. We’ve been passed throught a pre-historical computers (like Babbage machine), first hard drives and other interesting stuff. Besides of that we guested Mozilla company talking to it’s president and developers about open source projects, infuence of open source and some thoughts on how to be involved in open source community.

The final exam appeared to be not so difficult. I submitted it in time, even earlier than expected. I was also quite surpised, to see that deadline is a little prolonged up to 4th of June. Anyway, the solutions are submitted and now it would take up to 2 weeks waiting for results. I really looking forward and hoping to get my certificate.

Conluding this series of posts I have to say - Udacity courses are awesome! I really appreciate David Evans and Sebastian Thrun for making all that happen. My big credit goes to David who had lead CS101 and was just a perfect professor, clearly describe all the material and showing nice examples. I would like to say ‘Thank you’ for everyone envolved.

I think CS101 was great ‘warm-up’ course. I would not stop on that, but I already enrolled for next ones. This time I’ve choosen more fundametal - ST101 - Introduction to Statistics and CS215 - Algorithms, Crunching Social Networks. Both courses are starting June 25. Not sure, would it be possible to make them on parallel, so I might hold one if it would be to difficult. Besides of that I’m currenty looking throught CS253 - Web Application Engineering with Steve Huffman (the creator of reddit.com) just as a free course, to play a little more with Python and Google App Engine.

I highly recomend you to pickup some course today. And once again, thanks a lot to Udacity for that priceless opportunity to learn!