In spring of 2024 I decided to sign up for Professor Powell’s CSE 110, Software Engineering course at UCSD. With a hectic start and not enough chairs in one of the biggest lecture halls on campus, we started the course.

We were put into teams, and my team became Team Tungsten. This included myself and 10 other students.

The task we had been given was to create developer journal app on top of exams, long lectures, and some PAs.

We began to meet weekly and decided on a developer journal that would be modeled after the markdown editor: Obsidian

While in the course, we began to learn more about agile development, CI/CD pipelines, unit testing and all the good stuff when it comes to Software Development. So we decided to implement as much of this as we could.

We incorporated week long sprints and would review over the weekend and decide on the new tasks.

We decided to create a web-app using electron that would allow users ease of use when creating their journals.

Roles were designated to different people who wanted to learn different things, I was most interested in the back-end so I started work on our markdown interpreter.

Doing research, I needed to find something that was easy to implement and powerful for our journal. I looked at a lot of different tools and frameworks and ended up deciding to use Codemirror.

Codemirror was perfect; it offered markdown support with code-highlighting and an easy way to implement the editor into websites.

I struggled a bit with this as I didn’t have much experience with JavaScript but I was able to continue learning and making mistakes to put in an editor with a custom design that fit in with the rest of our app.

This was a very meme-heavy course and our professor loved to share his own, so a lot of our project videos were light and comedic which made for a fun final day. But my teammate Jesus create this video for our group showing our app in action.

I learned a ton about teamwork and proper development from this course. Being able to organize a project like this with as many people as we had was such a fun and challenging experience. I learned a ton about development and how to think about the users and ensure projects have good accessibility.