Real Web Apps

Real software is alive.

Much of the code you've written so far will not end up running for very long. The applications and services that people use tend to run for a long time, often years or decades.

That has a lot of implications. Instead of optimizing for ease of setting up, systems are optimized for maintenance. Most of the job of software engineers isn't building something from scratch, it's maintaining, fixing, and updating existing code.

This week, you'll learn a bit about the real-world considerations that impact software development. You'll also spend time exploring real-world application code from open-source projects, and catalog patterns you notice, as well as similarities and differences from the web applications you've worked on this term.

There is a lot more to learn about web applications. This week, you'll touch on a few disparate topics that make developers lives easier as they build and manage web applications.

You won't end this week an expert in each of these topics, but you will learn enough to recognize the terms and build a list of further ideas and concepts to explore after the course.