As I approach the end of my Capstone’s development process for the Winter term, I’ve found that I’ve grown quite a bit in the last three months. There are many obvious areas for individual growth when working on a software project. You can become a real code wizard, you may have learned quite a bit about architecture, maybe you discovered the secret to learning any data model no matter how convoluted.
In my case, I learned a great deal about operating with a team. There is a certain magic in many individual contributors coming together to accomplish a task larger than any one of them could do on their own in 10 weeks. In our case, the greatest hurdle came when each of us needed to dive into a huge, unknown enterprise codebase.
We quickly realized that the crew would need to be split into a pair of frontend and backend teams. It was awesome to share a GitHub and Discord channel and to see the activity of both teams as we clipped along towards our respective goals. On the backend, we played to one another’s strengths, I developed an API-endpoint, Matt created an Angular Service, and Miguel began work on an automated data pipeline.
Work on the Django API and Angular Service went quickly, finished in roughly two or three sprints. The greatest hurdle unexpectedly turned out to be simply downloading an Excel spreadsheet from Dropbox! Luckily, Miguel eventually uncovered a Python library for browser actions which saved the day and I was able to implement that first crucial step in the process.
Next term, things are looking very promising for our project! We’ll be happily polishing, documenting, and testing everything we built during the last couple of months.
– Robin
