CS467 Online Capstone Bailey Bonaci

Feb 23 2023

It is an interesting time to be working on a project using Chat GPT-3. With its recent claim to fame with Bing I’m finding myself surprisingly knowledgable about current events – maybe not the Microsoft event itself but the technology.

Chat GPT-3 has an easy to use API that is proving really useful for our information gathering project. I first was testing on the openAI site itself to check for validity of results and ability to answer the founder/funder specific questions. I found that if the name was unique enough and not brand new then the results were valid! This meant that looking into an implementation of the API would be worth our time. OpenAI had good documentation on using Chat GPT-3 which has been instrumental to our success. The free version might not be enough for our project though. So we might be applying for funding from the school.

This project is proving challenge and interesting and is morphing constantly into a vision we only gently foresaw in the beginning. Our team is working together though the struggles and changing landscape. Our industry partner mentioned using Chat GPT-4 haha all the options and improvements available are seemingly limitless.

Looking forward to our final product it should be cool!

Feb 9 2023

I believe we are reaching the crux of point in this project. We’ve done all the set up work and can get outputs in the proper format with the input required. The challenge though is getting the correct outputs.

I mentioned to my industry partners that this might be hard and that I’m not sure how to get the correct outputs but that I will start somewhere and see how far I can get. They kinda laughed and said that they never promised this would be easy. That was refreshing to hear. The understanding that this is new and challenging but that I am making progress was the validation I needed.

Unlike other classes at OSU I find myself using the internet to find others solutions to similar problems and kind of patch working a solution together with inspiration and APIs from many different sources. This means I’m bouncing around a few ideas at once – and so is my capstone project partner, the industry partner, and the industry partners tech supporter. So my brain is feeling jumbled with possible solutions and many directions to go. Moving forward to this next phase my goal is to try to do a bit more research – even just a pros and cons list – on the technologies/APIs before I begin to implement them. This will hopefully reduce rework.

Overall I’m enjoying what I’m learning and excited to see what total progress we make, especially given that I’m impressed by our almost half way there progress!!

Jan 24 2023

And so it begins – me and my teammate have an interesting project. A very passionate industry sponser and a lot of work ahead of us.

The balance of work, school, and social is always a struggle and I need to re-remember (just like I do every quarter) where the balance lies. I’m setting goals each day to make a small amount of progress. A mantra for many things in my life is “moving is winning” and that applies here too. Keep moving and progressing and things will work out.

I’m pretty excited about where I hope this project ends up. I can see the value that helping our industry partner take a first step into creating a better matching service for founders and funders will have. I hope this project will work to create the beginnings of such a service. Especially because it sounds like the current environment for founders and funders to find each other is riddled with paperwork and mazes of searches (our industry partner comically calls it spagetti).

My current challenge is learning the documentation for the tools/packages I plan to use for this project. I’m learning python-docx and learning that although it is quite powerful for looking though and creating word documents using python, it struggles searching for spaces and individual words. I’m working with my team to become unblocked. This experience with my team and industry sponser feels like industry. Even quite similar to my day job!

Jan 9 2023

It’s wild to remember starting this program as a 2020 quarantine project. This program really saved my mental health in 2020 and early 2021 during the deep pandemic so THANK YOU. Sometimes I cannot believe it is almost done – I’ve integrated this into my lifestyle.

Unlike 3 years ago when I started this program I now love… okay like… my job. I am currently a flight test engineer, I get to work with researchers to implement their technologies and test them on planes. It’s currently a really good fit. BUT I think it would be good to get out of the comfort zone and start applying to CS jobs when I graduate. In fact – one of my new years resolutions is to apply to a CS job and begin doing practice problems. Because I like my job – I need a little extra motivation to find a new job. Also there is the imposter syndrome saying that maybe CS is not for me or that for some reason because all of this is remote that I am somehow less qualified. Haha I really am trying to work on my confidence.

I am a goal setter and I love lists so… some of my goals for this quarter: