Practicum in Software Construction - Final Study Guide

Final Exam Format

The final will be administered through Canvas on Wednesday May 5th. It will be available all day but you will have 2.5 hours to complete the exam once you start. It is open book and open computer but all work must be completed independently. It will contain a mix of freeform concept questions, "find the bug" type problems, a couple "build this in AWS" questions and a couple short coding exercises.

What is not on the test?

  • The libraries and tools I bring up in the first 5 minutes of class. Those are just for fun. That includes Lombok, Spring-Data, etc.
  • Maven libraries as a general concept are fair game but I would not expect you to study any of the specific libraries we've used so far other than Spring and JUnit
  • I'm not expecting you to know any specific open source licenses. Open Source as a general concept is fair game
  • Other than the general concepts, Terraform will not be on the exam
  • Other than the general concepts, Containers and AWS Lambda will not be on the exam
  • You do not need to know how to build a resilient app in AWS for the final but you should know the concepts and what the specific components we covered are for (Load Balancers, ASGs, Target Groups, and Launch Configurations)
  • We covered Route53 for a hot second. That will not be on the test (but it's a good thing to be aware of)

Building in AWS

There will be at least one question that will have you set something up on AWS. This can either be:

  • Building a Java Spring app and getting it running on EC2
  • Build a few IAM users and give them different permissions

General Topics

This may not be a 100% complete list of topics but it should get you most of the way to what you need. The slides are your friends.

  • Git topics
    • What is a commit?
    • What are branches?
    • What does checking out a branch or a commit do?
    • What is a merge? What is a merge conflict?
  • Licenses
    • What is open source code? What are the boundaries on how you can restrict use?
  • Package Managers
    • What is a package manager? Why do we use them?
    • How does Maven help keep your Java project organized?
    • What is a JAR file?
    • Semantic Versioning
  • HTTP
    • Parts of an HTTP Request and Response
    • General networking concepts (IP addresses, public / private / local IP)
    • General info in a URL
    • The general idea of what REST is all about
  • Spring
    • What is Dependency Injection? Why is it helpful?
    • HTTP annotations for making a Spring server
      • @RestController
      • @GetMapping / @PostMapping / etc
      • @PathVariable / @RequestBody / @RequestParam
    • How to do dependency Injection
  • Automated Testing
    • How to write JUnit Tests
    • What is the structure of a test?
  • State Management
    • What is a pure function?
    • The state management errors we talked about in class
    • Make sure you understand the difference between pointing two variable names to the same object vs actually having different objects.
  • APIs
    • What is an API?
    • What are some of the things to think about when making an API?
  • EC2
    • What is an EC2 instance? How do you log on?
    • What are security groups (high-level)? Why do we add them?
    • How do we get Java apps running on EC2?
    • CLI vs GUI tools
    • Building an app from the command line
  • Resiliency (concepts only)
    • Improving one machine vs running a cluster
    • Launch Templates
    • AutoScaling Groups
    • Target Groups
    • Load Balancers
  • IAM
    • What is an IAM User?
    • Why create IAM users?
    • Authentication vs Authorization
    • What is an IAM policy?
    • The difference between an IAM role and a user
  • Cloud Data
    • What is S3? How is it better than storing data on one hard drive?
    • How does S3 play with IAM?
    • What is DynamoDB? What is fast and slow?
    • Purpose of Dynamo Indices
  • Infrastructure as Code
    • Why is it important?
    • Purpose of immutable infrastructure
  • Containers
    • What are they? Why are they useful
    • Same for lambdas

Tips

  • Get good at setting up a setting up a basic Spring project in your IDE. Maybe set up one ahead of time. Don't waste time futzing with IDE settings.
  • Make sure you know how to start a Spring server how to test your @GetMapping / @PostMapping / etc methods. If you haven't figured out Postman yet, now is the time.
  • Make sure you know how to include a new library in your project from Maven