As this is probably the last blog I am going to be doing I wanted to intentionally take some time to reflect on this course, and the project I am working on for Senior Capstone. I haven’t discussed the project very much because it is a completely different kind of project than I am used to. In the beginning there objectives and a plan for how to meet those objectives. But as the quarter has gone on this project has become more of a spelunking / trial and error project to give the client ideas for how they might build their end product in the future. My project is called Wine Data Lake, and the goal of the project was to build, or identify, processes to extract data from winery tech sheets saved in PDFs. A second goal was to store the data exported. The goal of the client was to have some ideas for how to build their back end frameworks for a website that they could use as a tool with friends and potential investors as a starting point for their future allthewineries.com project. Our final deliverable will be a list of things we tried, what worked, what issues did we run into, and what data were we able to collect. For all intents and purposes, this project is more of a research project, though I do not think it was originally expected to be that. So, with that in mind: what worked and what didn’t work
WORKED: Despite my partner and I being a team of two, living on opposites sides of the US, and both having fulltime jobs, I think we worked pretty well together. Most of the conversation was asynchronous. But with the time zone differences, we had about an hour window each night after I got home from work and before he went to bed for the night. We did well in utilizing that time when needed. With both of us having weekend availability we were able to overcome almost all time zone differences. In the future I think it would be a good idea to have a better plan for working synchronously if working with people in different time zones. I do think we both also did a good job of pulling together the things we needed to do exactly when we needed to do it.
COULD HAVE DONE BETTER: There are two things that I think could have gone better on this project. The first would be for the client to have an actual project with a deliverable. Instead, it has felt all along like it was an idea that a group of people got together and imagined up over a few glasses of wine. I think that the direction of our project would have been different if we had known/understood that the client wanted ideas on how to get the data from PDFs into a database. The other objectives for this project are more like stretch goals than real scope of work that could be completed.
The other thing we could have done better is tied to that. In the beginning my partner had an idea of how to get the data out. He found a tool that we could use and it seemed easy and black and white. I would have preferred both he and I work for a week to identify options and list pros and cons and then decide on a path forward with our client. Instead it felt very much like “I’m driving, get in the back and I’ll let you know when we are there”. I also felt almost embarrassed talking to our customer about the database stuff when it was clear that was more of an afterthought for them. I intend to do better on this before our next client meeting.
CONCLUSION: So in conclusion… this has been a fun project and also a confusing project at times. I think the biggest take away I have from it is to clearly define the expectations with the customer and develop success criteria with them before having a plan.
