I’m so excited that I’m approaching the finish line of this program. I’ve been enjoying the program for most of the time. And I wanted to say that this experience changed me a lot. What I gained the most is not the knowledge that this program delivered, but I learnt not to be afraid of challenges and not to underestimate myself. I used to be terrified when I did not think I’m good enough for something and people may think I’m not qualified for what I do. Now I have become more confident and open to take on new things. This change made me believe that I’m on the right track to become a good engineer. This one last project just reinforced it.

In our project, our team chose to use the firebase database. I did not know firebase before, and I learnt at a later time it’s nosql database so it’s very different from mySQL which I’m more proficient with. If it was old me, I would have felt so stressful about admitting my lack of knowledge in firebase and learning a new technology. This time, I really enjoyed learning something new and tried to grasp as much as I could. Last week, I worked on my part of the project which is to enable CRUD operations on the settings page. I also need to add an upload profile picture feature to the page. To get started, I went through the documentation that explains the methods to implement the functionality. At this stage, I still had no clue about what to do with firebase, how to render data, how to ‘query’ data with no sql syntax. I also can’t seem to find the method written in python in the documentation. I figured I should ask and I did and I immediately got a response from my teammate. See, asking questions is not really that bad. I said that to myself. The immediate help saved a lot of my time and pulled me back to the right track.

After implementing UPDATE functionality to change password and email, I quickly moved on to implement the profile picture feature. To implement this feature is more challenging and interesting than the update one, because I need to figure out how to save images in firebase and display it for the user, and let each user have their own associated picture. I had some ideas on how to make it work but since I have not done it before I would like to make sure I’m on the right track. My teammate helped me again this time and confirmed my thoughts. I was able to complete the backend of the settings page without encountering too many issues. I was really happy, although this is not a production wise project, I know I’m making small progress every single day. Having the courage to confront my weakness, not feeling ashamed about it, and being able to overcome it and stay positive and confident, I think this is really the most important thing I gained from taking this program.