Month: October 2020

I’m pretty happy to put this week behind me. It’s been pretty busy with a couple of different projects having similar due dates as well as a midterm this week. The good news is I feel like our Capstone team is making good progress with our project and it’s becoming very clear what the immediate next steps to take are. I’m pretty excited to get started learning Unity and hopefully using C# for the first time. It probably isn’t ideal to be learning a new programming language alongside a huge project like this, but I am really glad it’s something so different than what I’ve done in the past. 

On the note of new technology and Unity, I’ve started a Udemy class for Unity. So in addition to Unity, it is also my first time using Udemy. For our purposes it seems like a good investment. Although in general I have been skeptical about paying for online resources in the past. I usually tend to believe that unless something is very specialized, there’s usually a good enough free tutorial that’s just as good as paid content. But there are a lot of reviews for this particular course and it seems like it will teach us exactly what we need to learn in order to get started and be able to create our own visions. In addition using this course will put us all on the same page. If Udemy goes well I could see myself using it for their other classes as well. After all $10 is pretty cheap for 30 something hours worth of content. Again, I’ll have to see its quality, but it could end up being a good resource for continuing education after I’ve graduated. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I’ve worked this year. That there are a lot of things I want to learn that pertain directly to my job but that I don’t have time for.

This week I faced mostly time management challenges. The term is fully underway and bigger projects and assignments are underway or starting to be due. I am taking a course this term called Scientific Visualization which is using a lot of material I’m not familiar with. Mostly OpenGL. With what is taking most people a few hours to complete I’m taking around 8-10 hours on. Some of this is setting up the tools that I’m not used to and some of it is the type of programming is difficult for me. This week especially was hard because there were parts that didn’t even concern programming but were just math. And then after that I had to apply the mathematical concepts to programming. This has taken me a great deal of time and in addition to that I put a lot of time into my requirements writing assignment for Capstone. Between these two projects and things from other classes I found it a struggle to get everything done on time. Getting a balance between my personal life and school hasn’t been too much of a struggle and I don’t want it to become one in my final year.

Tailing off this challenge is the additional work I need to do for the actual Capstone project. There are tons of videos, tutorials, and documentation I need to look at and do in order to learn Unity and figure out some of the more basic functions that will allow me to implement the requirements of my project. I don’t feel too bad for not learning much about how to use Unity up until now, because the requirements were not really set. But now that I’ve submitted the individual requirements document and with the team document coming up, I will have no more excuses and I’ll need to get on it. 

Several things went good this week in regards to the project. Our group all got in contact with each other and had our first meeting. Everyone seems nice and motivated to do a good job on the project. We also scheduled our meeting with the client which should be good and officially get us on our way.

In my opinion the worst part of group projects is out of the way for this project. I think there is always some awkwardness to deal with when you meet new people and have to get to know them before working together. I think having three people in the group helps with that though, as there is not as many strangers you need to get familiar with in a hurry.

I found a cool tool this week through an assignment in this class. It was called Toggl Plan. It was basically the calendar view of Asana, but what I liked about it was the tool was focused on just that one view. Adding team members is possible so that their calendars are overlaid mine which would be great for seeing what other people are doing. The big advantage it had in my opinion was the way the tasks stretched out across the other days. Unfortunately I don’t think that I will be able to use it. It’s simply just too many tools. Right now I’m using Discord heavily which is new to me, and through my work I’m forced to use Google Calendar, so Toggl Plan would just be another thing to check. Discord has actually been another great tool I’ve discovered this term. I’ve heard about Discord a lot, but never used it. Now that I have I’m really enjoying it, and trying to get people at work and in my personal life to use it as well. But just like me those people have too many tools to keep up with so they don’t want to add another.

I’m looking forward to another productive week and meeting with our client!

This is the first blog post of the term and I’m just going to go through some of the suggested topics listed on Canvas:

• Computers have always been an interest of mine and something I’ve always liked to work with, so deciding to study Computer Science was a natural choice.
• I’m currently working full time doing tech for a K-12 school district in Oregon.
• My favorite listed projects generally had something to do with UI or HCI, which is great that I might get a chance to work on a project that relates to my focus.
• Lately I’ve been interested in hardware and networking. With my job I’ve had to learn a lot about server management and networks which has always been a gap in my knowledge.
• My favorite technologies are generally technology that automates tasks. Whether it’s simple scheduled software tasks or hardware such as robotic vacuums.

Going forward I’m excited to get started on this project and begin working on the final year of my time at OSU.