Ibro Tutic

CPRE 494

Computer Engineering

Cumulative Reflection

I transferred to Iowa State in 2017 after finishing my Physics degree at UNI. Coming to
ISU with another degree, I thought that I had figured out most of what was needed to be
successful in school and in the future work. Coming into the Computer Engineering major, I
quickly figured out that I still needed to figure out more ways to ensure my success in the future.
I started my time at Iowa State taking intro classes, like Intro to Programming (CS 227) and Intro
to Problem Solving (CPRE 185). From these classes, I realized that while I had the technical
knowledge needed, I really needed work on time management and design processes.
Classes like Software Development Practices, where I had to work with a team on a
semester long software project helped teach me the importance of design process and
communication. I came into the class thinking it would be fairly easy, because I had the technical
knowledge about the frameworks that could be used for the project. I started working on the
project almost right away and I quickly realized that there were edge cases that could affect the
entire future of the project. Regardless of my ability to solve the problem, I needed to make sure
that I communicated any potential issues to my team so we could find out the best way to solve
it. This semester I spent more time trying to understand any future implications of current design
decisions and attempting to avoid any big “uh oh” moments months into the project.
One of the biggest things that I did for my Software Development Practices project was
to design a really fast search engine for textual search across many different service profiles. I
was familiar with a distributed search engine called Elasticsearch from one of my internships at
John Deere. I spent about a month setting up this service and hooking it up with a different
Spring backend so that clients can search for things like haircuts, tutors, and other services based
on city, address, or any other profile information that a service provider signs up with.
I am now in Senior Design and everything my team is working on now is ensuring that
the simulators we have and the code we write in the future will meet the three basic requirements
of our project. We haven’t written any code and yet have been swamped with work ensuring that
the project is thoroughly designed and thought out. Things like auditing various simulators and
ensuring that provide the specific functionality that we need will save us a lot of time in the
future if we get to a point where we are missing a feature a few months down the road. I am also
learning a lot more about teamwork and communication in this project as well, because the work
has to be split up fairly and intelligently to ensure that we are able to operate with many tasks in
parallel. This was an extremely important skill to have learned, because it can be used
throughout my life on all different kinds of problems.
One of my best decisions at Iowa State was joining the Table Tennis club. I hadn’t really
been that involved in extracurricular (on-campus) activities before this, so I was pretty nervous
about what to expect, especially since I was pretty new at table tennis. My first day there I made
some good friends and am learning more and more about table tennis every time I go. More
importantly, I am learning how to ask the right questions so I can improve my table tennis skills
in various scenarios.
In August of last year, I accepted a job as a part time mobile developer with John Deere. I
thought that I was pretty good at Java and thought I would be able to hit the ground running, but
in my first few weeks of this job I realized that I had a lot left to learn. Mobile development is a
lot different than the type of development I did in class because you are heavily involved in
hooking up the user interface to data structures and code to actually do and show something on
the screen. I spent almost two months on my first defect and I progressively got faster and faster.
My biggest project for this job was creating a service to provide weather to mobile
applications. This service was built using a language that I wasn’t super familiar with and needed
to be run in the cloud, so I spent a lot of time learning how our current service works. From
there, I needed to work extensively with other team members through pair programming and
follow test driven development standards to ensure that the service could provide all of the data
we need from three different databases. Here I spent a lot of time on the design process too, but I
didn’t really have the luxury of messing up, since this service would be used by customers all
over the world, which made me work even harder during the design process.
My time at Iowa State has taught me a lot about my major and more importantly, it taught
me how to tackle challenging problems from a less technical approach. Classes like Senior
Design and Software Design Practices help teach me more than technical skills. Skills like
teamwork and designing a solution I can use for the rest of my life. ISU and my internships have
done a really good job and giving me the necessary technical and teamwork skills to be
successful in any facet of life.