Asa's Capstone Adventures

Time for the third post of this capstone blog! Just for a small recap from last post, my team had finalized the ideas we had for our project, had worked out the details of how we wanted to modularize the project, what technologies we wanted to use, and I went in depth on how I felt about our plans for the backend API of our project.

We’ve been working a lot more independently since the last post. We had one meeting with our sponsor, and from then on we’ve all been trying to grind out the individual parts of our project. With that being the case, I want to use this post to discuss the following two topics (provided by our friends over at the canvas assignment page):

1. How is the journey so far?
2. How well is your team following your original Team Standards?
3. Do you feel your project is on track to succeed? If not, what do you plan to do to get back on track?

With my group working more independently recently, I’ve had some time to do on my own thing and work in my own way. I think by taking the time now to reflect on these three topics, I’ll be able to get a good sense of how I feel I’ve been working so far, and how I want to continue to move forward within the context of this project.

How is the journey so far?

Overall, I’d say the journey is going pretty well, but looking back I think we for sure had a slow start. I like that we took extra time to plan at the beginning to the term, because it gave us all a really solid foundation to work with when we started to work independently. At the same time, I feel like because we spent so long planning, the amount of actual work we have done on the project is a bit behind where I would want it to be at this point.

I’m finding myself unsatisfied with how much work I’ve done, but I also want to acknowledge the work I have done. I think I have a tendency to code in a way that makes me spend hours upon hours coding over a few days rather than a few hours coding over many days. For a lot of school assignments in the past, this style of coding would be fine (at the very least it’s gotten me this far), but for a project where we pretty much have 10 weeks to do one assignment, saving it all for the last week is unrealistic.

I think moving forward, my goal is to focus on balancing my other classes with the capstone course, and finding time to code every day during the week rather than saving it for one or two days throughout the week. This way, I’ll have more consistent updates for my teammates, and I also think I’ll feel more satisfaction with the amount of work that’s slowly being completed.

How well is your team following your original Team Standards?

My team has been great to work with. I’ve been in tons of projects where I’m the only one doing work, or the only one communicating, and this isn’t one of those groups. We’ve had basically daily communication over discord about the project. From little updates or asking for help, there hasn’t been any hesitation from my teammates or myself, and it’s been really nice.

This doesn’t mean that we’ve been following our team standards to their exact specifications though. We’ve gotten a lot more relaxed about our weekly meetings, and I think that’s in large part due to the fact that we communicate so much. We don’t need to have long drawn out meetings for things we’ve been messaging about on discord already, and it’s much better for us to continue to work on the project and meet our own goals rather than spend extra time in meetings that don’t really advance the project.

The lack of meetings has caused me a little anxiety, just because I don’t have a clear, structured discussion about where we are with our project consistently. I think I need to kind of relax and have faith that our project is going well, because when I look at it objectively it is going well. It’s just not in a way that I did my projects throughout school, so I feel like I need to adjust my mentality in this area.

Do you feel your project is on track to succeed? If not, what do you plan to do to get back on track?

I do think our project is on track to succeed, but I also think we need to put some extra work in to get it to where I wanted it to be at this point. My real goal is to have a working site with multiple pages by when the next progress report is due. That specific date is May 8th. A stretch goal is to actually have a working site on some level done by tomorrow, so that we can show our sponsor where we’re at and give her a cool demonstration of her vision coming to life.

For that to happen, I have to finish coding by the afternoon tomorrow. I know earlier I said I wasn’t gonna just grind out long hours of coding, and really try to put the work in consistently over multiple days, but I also have the rest of today free to code, so I think this is a good opportunity to do some of the catching up I was talking about. I’m going to end the post here so I can hopefully have a great site to show our sponsor tomorrow! (I promise I’ll be more disciplined in my coding after today!)

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this post, and hopefully I’ll see you in the next one!

Welcome back to the second post of this capstone blog. To recap from last time, the project my team is working on is creating a web app for a climate change board game. Since the last post, a lot has happened behind the scenes getting ready for the project. This included four major meetings, alongside some asynchronous chats about the project.

The four meetings (with a fifth one happening in two days time from the time of this post) included an initial meeting with the team to set expectations, a meeting with our projects sponsor, and two more meetings discussing our vision for what our sponsor wants, as well as develop our initial project plan. What we got out of all these meetings was a solid idea of what technologies we want to use for our project. It’s these technologies that I want to discuss in this post.

Much like the last time, I’ll be breaking the post into sections based off of the questions I chose to answer from the assignment page for this post. Those questions are as follows.

1. Why did you and your team choose the technologies you did?
2. What do you like or dislike about your server/backend system/API?
3. What do you like or dislike about your design modularity? Does it enable each of your to work independently?

I think that by breaking the post into these three sections, it will give you a good idea of how the past few weeks have gone for me in terms of planning, as well as my feelings in regards to the next steps of the project.

Why did you and your team choose the technologies you did?

For this project, we plan to construct an HTML web app that can be used by our projects sponsor and her students to study for their midterm exams of the class SUS 101 at Oregon State. We could have chosen to make a mobile app, but since none of our group has experience in mobile app development, we decided that we wanted to use and improve upon the skills we already have in web development.

For the backend of the site, we plan to use a Flask framework with Python3. We could have gone with Javascript and Node.js but our team unanimously agreed that since we’ve used Python throughout the program, and it’s what we’re most comfortable with, that’s what we would want to use. We want to be able to deliver our projects sponsor the highest quality product we can, so we wanted to use technologies we already had experience with.

The exception to that rule is with how we plan to host our website. The site will be hosted through Google Cloud, which is actually something I’m learning about in my cloud development course this term. Since it’s what I’m learning and have the most experience in the group with, we decided that this was going to be part of the project that I’m going to be in charge of.

What do you like or dislike about your server/backend system/API?

When it comes to using the Google Cloud servers, I’m nervous but also excited to show what I can do and how fast I can implement what I learn. From what I’ve used of them so far, I think they’re fairly manageable when it comes to making a website live, and it’s also fairly easy to implement. I think the harder part will be for me to learn how to implement games into the website. It’s not something I’ve ever done before, but I like that we’re going to be using Python to code since it’s a language I’m very familiar with. Flask is also something I have a few classes worth of experience with now, and I’m continuing to use it in my cloud development course this term, so I’m excited to use it in a more open ended environment.

What do you like or dislike about your design modularity? Does it enable each of your to work independently?

Overall I feel pretty good about the design modularity of our project. We broke up the project into three major parts

1. The front end HTML/CSS
2. The Backend Python/Flask
3. The Google Cloud server connection

Each of us has decided which part we want to be the lead on after discussing each of our strengths and weaknesses, so I think we’re all happy with what we’re the lead on. The nice part about how we have it set up is that even though one of us is the lead for a particular section, that doesn’t mean we can’t help the other’s with their parts. It helps with planning out what needs to be done by when, but it also allows the flexibility to ask for help or to schedule time to assist our teammates. By having one of us be the lead for each section of our project, it also allows us to practice modularizing our own part in the way that works best for us which I think is also a nice bit of added flaxibility.

Overall I think the amount of planning we put into the project is going to pay off as we get started on actually coding it. I want to have one more meeting with our sponsor to make sure we have their requirements met, but after that I think we’ve set ourselves up for a successful rest of the term. I think the technologies we decided to use allow for all of us to have a sense of comfort and confidence going into the project, while also allowing us to continue to develop our skills as we get ready to enter into the workforce.

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you in the next post!