Month: April 2022

Another week and another set of new experiences for me. Friday will mark my first whole month as an official professional software developer. I still have no clue what’s going on, but I think I am making progress. I understand what they mean by imposter syndrome now. It blows my mind that I’ve been studying CS since 2019 and this degree seems really is just the the bare minimum to start drinking from the fire hose of new information and expectations that is professional tech world. That said, I’m lucky enough to have a small and supportive team, though, and they seem happy to have me which is great – since I feel like more of burden than anything else at the moment. I suppose they all went through the same thing, which is encouraging.

In other news, the capstone project goes well. I think we’ve made great progress towards the midpoint benchmark and I think we will end up having a simple albeit robust app that could potentially be expanded in the future. Through the project I’ve learned a lot about more about flutter, dart, and full stack development. I can’t wait to graduate and get my nights and weekends back so I might be able to start pursuing some personal projects. The end of the quarter and my time at OSU is only 5 weeks away! Keep it real out there.

Hello everyone! It has been a busy and exciting week for me for a couple of reasons.

First, my capstone project group wrote and pushed our first commits to our group repo. I managed to get the basic front end flutter structure of the app set up and then incorporated some of my teammates widgets/screens. We now have something actually tangible to show and I’m starting to feel very optimistic about the project. Although, I didn’t get as much code written as I’d like, it was an excellent review week for flutter. I also spent some time reading documentation and learning about the flask micro architecture (which I have no experience with), which I felt was very constructive. I still haven’t managed to get my local server up and running yet but one of my teammates working on the back end was nice enough to create a little guide for how they set it up. Thanks, Marodin!

Secondly: status of the new job. Great so far. I’m so glad I don’t work in manufacturing anymore. People are not only happier but smarter and more helpful in this industry. For awhile I wasn’t sure if I was making the right choice by pursuing this program and trying to change careers, but now I’m really feeling like it was probably one of the best choices I’ve ever made. Apparently I’m doing pretty well too (although that’s not really for me to decide). I’ve already made my first pull requests to some of the company repositories and I’m starting to get a good feel for the whole Ruby/Rails framework. In fact, I even got invited to go to RailsConf with the rest of the team in Portland in May, which will be my first industry event. I’m super excited.

That’s it for me this week. Have a good one.

I missed my last post due to being super busy and overwhelmed with my new job and our capstone project plan.

So, the new job. Let’s talk about it. So far it’s awesome and way better than my last job. I’m on the development team for the company’s 3 mains apps. They are all Ruby on Rails apps (something that I’ve never had any experience with) and right now I have almost no clue what’s going on, but it feels good! My coworkers are all super cool and helpful and I think I got really lucky scoring this gig. More to come as I learn this new framework and all of the other skills that go into being a software developer!

Onto the capstone project. It was a busy weekend for us. As a team, we probably spent a good 10 hours total in our MS Teams chat hashing out the scope of our app and the team responsibilities. It was a little rough and first but I think we have a solid plan now!

Here is an overview:

Our group will be developing a crowd-sourced shopping app for our capstone project. Our goal will be to create a simple and robust app with a large potential for expansion in the future. For the scope of this class however, the final app will focus on only meeting the basic requirements set forth in the project description. The app’s primary value proposition will be to provide users with a ‘best’ recommended store based on the items on their shopping list compared to crowd-sourced data of other users that has been uploaded at surrounding stores by other users. The database of item uploads and prices is appended to, when users scan barcodes of items in store, enter their prices, apply identifying tags, and upload directly to our database. Crowd-sourced data is inherently unreliable and one of the goals of the app will be to make uploading as simple as possible and done in such a way that the amount of data, and its potential uses, can be maximized. In addition, to incentivize users to create uploads, a reputation system is implemented where users obtain new titles as they reach certain numbers of price updates. Finally, users can post comments to a live feed, providing extra shopping information like store busyness, out-of-stock items, and other helpful details.