Sometimes, even when you think you know, you don’t.

In the few weeks since last post there has been some growing pains that I didn’t expect and some I did. Being in charge of a project for the first time, I expected that my lack of knowledge may cause some hiccups. And they have. That said, having 4+ years of management experience I didn’t think actually being the project lead would be an issue. But it has. So lets explore what’s happened, what has been learned and what we are still learning.

We have a group of four for our project, out of the four of us I am the only one that isn’t an international student. Communication has been mostly fine, but I think there might be some cultural differences that I am struggling to figure out. For the most part they keep their opinions to themselves, they aren’t as direct with their responses and prefer to just be assigned work than bring forth issues they have found and want to work on. If this was my only class or a job, I don’t think this would be as big an issue, but as another student I don’t have time to my part and all the ground work for their part too.

One of the issues I expected to have was not fully understanding the project at first. We inherited a project that was already started, so digging through 20 plus files of code and trying to understand what is going on has been an uphill climb. Thankfully I expected this issue and have tried to reach out to our sponsor for any help from the previous team and relied on what my team understands and can communicate to me.

I am still working on my javascript/react/css skills and understanding as it is much further behind that I would like. But currently working on getting a local version up and running so I can play around with the code as thats the best way I learn. Hopefully next post around I can speak to some solid progress on the project.

Last little tidbit I wanted to add here is how exciting it is to learn something and be able to put it immediate to work. I have been learning SQL lately and figured out some ways to improve my mothers databases that she maintains for the Oregon Department of Transportation. One of the main reasons I got into Computer Science was to find solutions to problems and it always feels nice to accomplish one of those goals.