This course has been a great experience for me. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to work in a team on a large project and get valuable practice with the flow of continuous integration and continuous delivery, code reviews, peer programming, stand-ups, and general team communication. My team was also fortunate to work with a sponsor, and they have been invaluable resources throughout development.
For me, I think my biggest breakthrough in general has just been getting used to the little things that facilitate group development like staying organized with Git — particularly with a project this big! Before this course, I hadn’t had much experience with CI/CD so any comments, commit messages, and branch names didn’t get much thought beyond what made sense to me. However, when you’re writing code that will be seen and reviewed by other team members, those details need to be considered carefully to communicate the your code’s intentions as clearly as possible to get the most out of your team’s time and review.
I’ve also grown much more comfortable with backend development and database design through this experience. My team decided to use Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, and PostgreSQL for the backend of our project, which other than Python were all completely new to me. Previously I’ve relied on Javascript and Node.js, but FastAPI has definitely won me over. Their documentation is excellent, so I was able to pick it up quickly, and features like automatic, interactive documentation made testing and debugging a breeze alongside Postman. I can’t imagine writing documentation myself again!
Overall, I’ve learned to not be afraid of learning. A capstone project is by nature overwhelming since it’s more or less the combination of everything you’ve learned before. I had been exposed to Git, CI/CD, databases, backend server logic, etc. in bits and pieces, isolated in other courses, but with all of the new technologies putting it together felt quite daunting. But, once I did some research and dug into the documentation I started to make and notice real progress. Soon enough, along with the efforts of my teammates, the project took shape! Over the last couple months, I’ve realized that embracing the unknown and committing to continuous learning are the keys to turning daunting challenges into rewarding accomplishments.
Here’s to the next project!
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