Gail Kaiser

This has been one of my favorite CS classes at Columbia. What I appreciated most is how practically applicable the material is: the techniques map closely to what you’ll encounter in a typical SWE internship, but with a more formal, disciplined framework. For example, most internships will teach you to write unit tests to validate basic functionality. What you likely won’t get on the job—and what this class does especially well—is a structured way to reason about test quality using concepts like equivalence partitioning. The delivery is also excellent. Professor Kaiser explains concepts carefully and at a pace that makes the material genuinely digestible. I consistently felt like I knew what was going on, and the slower pacing gave me time to think critically and ask meaningful questions. I also really liked the interactive portions of lecture, where the class would reason through code snippets together and identify issues. Another thing I appreciated: when students asked questions about material that wasn’t planned for that day, Professor Kaiser would often take note and come back to address it in a later lecture. That’s going above and beyond, and it showed real care for students’ learning experience.

Well, I wanted to do my part of informing you ignorant folks, in case you happened to like this name 'Web enhanced Information Management', because the moment you hear this name(Just like I did), you start dreaming of learning something cool...like...Using web for managing data...something like Facebook ?....something like twitter ?....something Like Google Plus ....or say even Amazon....Google search engine....Bing...what not...? Well, wake up ignorant souls, THIS COURSE IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE DREAMING/THINKING OF, even when it should sound like that. This course starts with a horrible professor telling you history of probably Internet and few technologies like HTML, Javascript, etc.Not for one lecture or two....but straight for HALF a semester....reamaining half..?SHE WILL DUMB FUCK SIT IN CLASS AND HEAR YOU PRESENT YOUR PROJECT AND GIVEN YOU A FUCKING GRADE....free ride...hmm....and WASTE OF TUITION? So, you are just suppose to hear her speak or pretend to hear her for half a semester(good lord...there are points taken off if you happen to miss a class....WAW.....what a PROF...SHIT GAIL Kaiser)...say half of tuition fee of this course...telling what all happened and when? DO YOU INTEND TO LEARN THAT AFTER PAYING SO MUCH in this course at COLUMBIA ...an Ivy league university? You will be made to produce a paper for mid term that constitutes half of your whole semester grade. Th…

The course was all online, which seemed fine to start but midway through the semester became frustrating. Most of the Zoom sessions consist of TA demos, some of which were helpful, others not so much. The bulk of the grade is the team project, which comes after an individual project. The individual project teaches you about GitHub workflows, unit testing, etc. and was very helpful. The group project is developing a functional API, which was also a very interesting undertaking. Unfortunately, half of my team members basically did no work and waited until the last second to make only minor contributions, so the team aspect of it seemed useless. However, I learned so much working on the API, it's hard to find much negative to say about the course.

The lectures during the first half of the class were informative. The paper, project, and presentation were fun. This is a rare class in the CS program in that you can elect not to be in a group! Read that last sentence over again. I feel like way too much of my time has been wasted working with incompetent group members in other courses. The only downside to this course is that you are forced to sit through the other student's presentations. As in you get major points deducted if you skip even one day during student presentations. Many of your fellow students will not know how to give a presentation (dense text on slides, try to cover 40 slides in 10 minutes, mumble through the whole thing, etc). Many of them will also not speak English very well, some not at all. I kind of feel like it is somewhat sadistic to make a student that barely speaks English give a presentation... and make other people sit through it as well. Simple solution: bring a laptop and work on your project!

Not recommended. Prof not nice. Didn't learn much things. Very poor experience with Zoom lectures. Time wasted on toy projects. Didn't see the point of having exams, though in the format of take-home assessments.

Professor Kaiser's lectures are generally quite well done. She uses lots and lots of powerpoint slides, which isn't generally my favorite approach -- I like it when lecturers use fewer slides, or just chalk and chalkboard if they can get away with it -- but she pulls it off pretty well. The class organization is quite strong, particularly with regard to the major assignments (paper and project, both of which include several milestones to meet aside from the final submission.) The work required and assignment specs were all laid out pretty clearly at the beginning of the semester, which was really refreshing, actually. Most of the other C.S. classes I've been in don't make specifications for assignments available until 1-3 weeks before they come due; it's hard to plan a semester that way. I'd say the course is intended to give a flavor of how web technology is used and how it developed -- up to and including the state of the art -- and it works well in that regard. A lot of information goes by quite fast, especially by the end, but students don't have to do all that much with lectures that don't relate to their project and paper, as there aren't exams.

Whoever took this class with Shirish as TA onboard knows what I mean. Shirish shouldn't be a head TA at all, he controlled your grade and would not care for students and Gail was too busy to do any grading at all. Several students argued with Shirish many times and his condescending attitude pissed everyone off. Overall a class with good content but the assignments were too easy(Shirish made it harder by giving low grades). When Shirish onboard, jump off!

Not much, but I still question myself what I learnt in this course? Better I did not join college..or atleast not Columbia SEAS or dropped out of college....but I had no options....but you probably have if you are reading this...

Overall, I recommend not taking this course. The ideas behind this course are simple: think in terms of the customer and plan your project accordingly. Unfortunately, a lot of the documentation we do is not really meaningful, and the pace of the class could be faster. We spend several weeks on design patterns, and another several weeks on "bug testing", which is stuff you pretty much already know. If you want to challenge yourself on your road to becoming a fully-fledged Computer Scientist, don't take this class. If you are looking for an easy course to take on the side, while knocking out your tech electives, you might consider ASE. This class is not really "Advanced Software Engineering", it should be called "Software Project Planning for Enterprise". The midterm reflected the course. It was pretty easy, with just definitions and written explanations of concepts. But at the end of the day, how much did you learn compared to a class like OS or Algorithms?

15 page paper on some web related topic of your choice and a pretty large programming project, again your choice, as long as it has to do with the web, and a 10 minute presentation. Not bad for a 6000 level course.