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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Functional Programming in Scala Capstone by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

4.4
stars
542 ratings

About the Course

In the final capstone project you will apply the skills you learned by building a large data-intensive application using real-world data. You will implement a complete application processing several gigabytes of data. This application will show interactive visualizations of the evolution of temperatures over time all over the world. The development of such an application will involve: — transforming data provided by weather stations into meaningful information like, for instance, the average temperature of each point of the globe over the last ten years ; — then, making images from this information by using spatial and linear interpolation techniques ; — finally, implementing how the user interface will react to users’ actions....

Top reviews

MP

Sep 7, 2019

The capstone project has done a fantastic job of drilling in some of the important fundamentals taught in the rest of the courses. It is definitely worth taking if you've done the rest of the courses.

KB

Jun 13, 2017

Good course, some of the assignments could have been more explicit with expectations in cases where specific implementation details matter but the forums were helpful in that regard anyways.

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51 - 75 of 93 Reviews for Functional Programming in Scala Capstone

By Carlos L

Jun 23, 2017

Excellent

By Ronald C M

Jun 26, 2019

The best

By IURII B

Aug 7, 2017

Thanks

By Francisco J D d S F G

May 24, 2018

I really enjoyed this course - it goes from the very basics of Spark and tests your ability regarding Scala knowledge.

The capstone project is really well structured, but at times it felt like the instructors could give more information concerning some definitions around the project, i.e. how all of the case classes from the models file interconnect or relate to each other. By the end of the project it would be helpful explaining how the Layer class was actually structured as well.

In reality my opinion of this course is 4.5 out of 5 - I think the instructors made an admirable job trying to convey most of specialization concepts into the capstone, so congratulations :-). If not for some of the aspects above, I would rate it 5/5.

By Ignacio G S

Jul 10, 2021

Excellent course to put everything learned in the previous four into practice (Spark, Big Data, Parallel Programming, and Functional Scala design and programming).

The only thing I didn't like is that the corrections were a little tricky and I finish guessing what I had to do, or trying many combinations until succeeded.

Overall I learned a lot of things and the graders and the grader tests are very well implemented to ensure the quality of the solution.

By Edem N

Jul 29, 2019

A good project broken down into stages that can be independently tested to produce a final product that is both complex and interesting. The forum didn't have any of the TA's responding during my period and as such mean't that any concerns that I had were not being addressed. I had particular concerns with the grader input data where I had issues with its output. Apart from that a great way to put all the skills of the Scala Specialization into use.

By Niels P

Jul 24, 2017

Excellent capstone that lets you test your knowledge of Scala in a (semi)real project environment. Though i found that the main difficulty for me was in understanding the context of geographical computations. Making it difficult to find if not passing test was due to error in my code or in my understanding of geographical context.

By Rob S

Nov 26, 2018

Interesting project and fun to work on.

As with many of the other courses, could benefit from providing a few tests. Even after writing property-based tests using ScalaCheck there were some grader results that I was unable to reproduce.

In the end, still worth the time and effort invested.

By Alan A

Nov 16, 2019

The course is great, but if you pass all tests, in Week 4 you can get the certificate. The project is linked to Week 1, which is weird because doesn't match well with the schedule set in Coursera.

By Rodolfo N P

Aug 9, 2018

For a lot of sections one couldn't really use Spark, said sections were restricted to translating Spark datastructures to Scala collections and working with those.

By Chet W

Jan 29, 2018

Very cool to see the entire application fit together eventually. However, feel sometimes the explanation for the exercise could have used more details/examples.

By Jean-Francois T

Apr 18, 2017

A bit sad that actual full working solution is not graded as it invovled generating files on disk, which is compuation intensive...

By Fernando C

Jun 6, 2018

Good Spark / Big Data project.

Provides a good example of real problem project focussed on Spark and big data analysis.

By Aleksei S

Aug 3, 2017

The tasks are very interesting! Unfortunately, sometimes the causes for the failure of the tests are not clear.

By Natalija I

Jan 4, 2019

Capstone project is challenging specially because of the performance standards. I enjoyed solving the problems

By Andronik

Jun 16, 2017

Interesting project, but exercises were too simple. I was able to complete with course in 5 evenings.

By Korntewin B

Jan 27, 2021

The course is hard but fruitful, you will exploit what you learn from the specialization!

By Carsten I

Oct 20, 2019

Tough but interesting, it definitely showed you the importance of writing unit test!

By Arthur

Apr 18, 2017

Good project enjoyed playing with the Scala.ja

By Anton A

Dec 7, 2020

More details for exercises would be great.

By Wolfgang G

Sep 1, 2017

pretty tough, but informative!

By Hong C

Apr 19, 2020

Well designed project.

By Adam R

May 3, 2023

Wish this course involved more advanced scala libraries like spark or akka

I used spark in only the first 2 milestones and then after that it was parallel scala collections the rest of the way.

Not much of my knowledge from parallel scala course was used i feel like but i could be wrong.

also my desire to use spark in the beginning messed me up once i got tot he 3rd and 4th milestones which i recognize is my own fault but it would be good if there was a stronger hint that these higher level libraries are no longer appropriate.

what makes this harder is that the grader is very opaque when running into timeout / out of memory exceptions. doesn't tell what test caused that error nor does it give any more details. Trying to replicate the smaller machine environment locally during testing did not really help at all.

Just consider making those errors more explicit. Would make it easier to debug and then easier to proceed with the course.

Anyway, thank you for a great course and specialization overall. I learned so much and am greatly appreciative that I was able to learn Scala.

All the best! Adam Ramos

By Michael L

Jan 11, 2020

I did the original courses back in 2016 and have used Scala consistently in various roles. I've done so many courses, I wanted to just finish this one and complete the specialization. I think I'm familiar with various Typelevel projects, SBT itself (I wrote a cucumber plugin for it) and have used Shapeless and Cats in anger. I'm familiar with ScalaCheck and have done a few O/S projects. This course ... perhaps I'm being unfair, but the project doesn't feel 'idiomatic Scala'. I think the course could use some of the Typelevle libraries as a starting point and lead devs into how to write functional Scala. In my experience - Scala is used a) for a functional programming language b) to drive Spark. Just as people will use Python for numpy/tensorflow (e.g. you can't compare Spire with numpy). The ML niche is lost, so I hope the content of these courses will still be useful for another 5 years.

By Ryan S

Jun 12, 2018

I enjoyed this course, but I believe there are some errors in the grading code related to interpolating colors. I raised an issue about it on the week 5 forum but never got a response. The project was interesting, but it would have been nice if there was a way that we could have been a bit more free in how we designed the interfaces. If you were trying to use something like a spark RDD it made it pretty cumbersome, having to always fit everything to an Iterable at the end. ALSO, I tried to add a library when I was doing this to add the shapeless library to this to add some interesting features which would have made the code a lot more general. I spent days getting it to work, only to realize you library dependencies are not actually imported when you submit, it only runs with the base ones that were pre-defined. A warning about that would have been nice.