CS 3240

Definitely a useful and relevant CS course, as you learn a lot of things that will be used in internships and the industry. It is formatted by having lectures and the main course work is a semester long group project, that is made to be like working on a real software development team. You definitely learn a lot in this course and you walk away having built a website and having skills that you can share about in interviews. People always say this, but it is very true, make sure to start on the Django project early, otherwise you will spend hours on the last day in office hours and not be able to finish. Outside of the project, you have quizzes for each unit and different in-class (some out of class) guided practices. McBurney is a fine professor, they have YouTube videos of all the lectures and it was also available on zoom so it is up to you whether you go to lectures in person. Overall, I highly recommend taking this class, it has felt like the most useful CS class I have taken so far!

Overall, CS 3240 was one if not my favorite class I have taken at UVA. The project is the bulk of the work but there are quizzes every two or so weeks as well as weekly guided practices that you can knock out within 30-45 minutes. Collaboration for most guided practices is required for most of them which further lessens the workload. As others have stated, your team makes or breaks this entire class for you in terms of enjoyment, workload, as well as what you learn. I would recommend this class for anyone who wants to go into software engineering because not only will you learn valuable technical skills (Python, Django, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Testing), but you will also harbor those soft skills that are needed to work within a development team efficientely and effectively. Professor McBurney was great during lectures but I would recommend not doing the demo with him if you can help it. He was very rude and harsh on our project despite giving us a very good grade (showing that the project indeed was not as bad as he made it out to be). #tcf2020