Hi everyone, Ali again!
As I’m reflecting on the quarter and my designated project and team assignment, I find myself understanding and looking to what the project itself meant and how it helped us grow. The project was a true example of software engineering – collaboration, user requirement gathering, dynamic and consistent pivoting/alterations in order to meet expectations, and dealing with unforeseen issues in an analytic and targeted way. We worked collaboratively in a way that I felt was consistent, communicative, and powerful in its’ own right. My biggest success I feel in this course was taking user requirements from the project mentor and translating that into the WordPress platform, a platform I’ve never worked with or used. I was able to quickly learn how to add plug-ins and make changes to the website in a way that was aligned with whatever the project mentor wanted from us. I saw the breakthrough as being the transformation from programming to software engineering – where we know how to work cross-collaboratively, work with other people from different backgrounds, and also work with a non-technical project mentor and explain difficult technical concepts in a meaningful, easy-to-understand way. It mattered because we were able to communicate effectively with the project mentor because of this communication strategy / clear attempts to break difficult concepts into easier-to-understand. Technical jargon can get incredibly hard to understand, especially for non-technical staff members. I learned that programming is not all that constitutes software engineering – there’s a lot more to it. Prototyping, designing, programming, communication & leadership connection, cross-collaborative teamwork, and documentation/language learning on the spot. WordPress is also a language in its’ own right – a platform that abstracts away a lot of the coding elements but the use of plug-ins, the platform in itself, and other integrative services has its’ own learning curve as well. I had to watch videos, read documentation, look up plug-in information & documentation, and learn how to learn effectively. I learned that I’m someone who likes to learn from documentation & push myself a bit more than I’m used to and that I’m someone who can actively and coherently communicate with others, especially with other people from different backgrounds. It goes to show how software engineering is a diverse & multi-layered practice and field, where it doesn’t just matter how well you can code, but also how well you can interpret user requirements, work with others, and also break down technical designs into prototypes, design principles, accessibility features, and bite-sized coding chunks so the project can be easily tracked and made manageable with tangible, SMART goals. With this, commonly used by AGILE & Scrum methodologies, I learned a lot more about the software development lifecycle and about how I like to learn and communicate with others.
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