Blog Post #3: Progress

Time for the third post of this capstone blog! Just for a small recap from last post, my team had finalized the ideas we had for our project, had worked out the details of how we wanted to modularize the project, what technologies we wanted to use, and I went in depth on how I felt about our plans for the backend API of our project.

We’ve been working a lot more independently since the last post. We had one meeting with our sponsor, and from then on we’ve all been trying to grind out the individual parts of our project. With that being the case, I want to use this post to discuss the following two topics (provided by our friends over at the canvas assignment page):

How is the journey so far?

How well is your team following your original Team Standards?

Do you feel your project is on track to succeed? If not, what do you plan to do to get back on track?

With my group working more independently recently, I’ve had some time to do on my own thing and work in my own way. I think by taking the time now to reflect on these three topics, I’ll be able to get a good sense of how I feel I’ve been working so far, and how I want to continue to move forward within the context of this project.

How is the journey so far?

Overall, I’d say the journey is going pretty well, but looking back I think we for sure had a slow start. I like that we took extra time to plan at the beginning to the term, because it gave us all a really solid foundation to work with when we started to work independently. At the same time, I feel like because we spent so long planning, the amount of actual work we have done on the project is a bit behind where I would want it to be at this point.

I’m finding myself unsatisfied with how much work I’ve done, but I also want to acknowledge the work I have done. I think I have a tendency to code in a way that makes me spend hours upon hours coding over a few days rather than a few hours coding over many days. For a lot of school assignments in the past, this style of coding would be fine (at the very least it’s gotten me this far), but for a project where we pretty much have 10 weeks to do one assignment, saving it all for the last week is unrealistic.

I think moving forward, my goal is to focus on balancing my other classes with the capstone course, and finding time to code every day during the week rather than saving it for one or two days throughout the week. This way, I’ll have more consistent updates for my teammates, and I also think I’ll feel more satisfaction with the amount of work that’s slowly being completed.

How well is your team following your original Team Standards?

My team has been great to work with. I’ve been in tons of projects where I’m the only one doing work, or the only one communicating, and this isn’t one of those groups. We’ve had basically daily communication over discord about the project. From little updates or asking for help, there hasn’t been any hesitation from my teammates or myself, and it’s been really nice.

This doesn’t mean that we’ve been following our team standards to their exact specifications though. We’ve gotten a lot more relaxed about our weekly meetings, and I think that’s in large part due to the fact that we communicate so much. We don’t need to have long drawn out meetings for things we’ve been messaging about on discord already, and it’s much better for us to continue to work on the project and meet our own goals rather than spend extra time in meetings that don’t really advance the project.

The lack of meetings has caused me a little anxiety, just because I don’t have a clear, structured discussion about where we are with our project consistently. I think I need to kind of relax and have faith that our project is going well, because when I look at it objectively it is going well. It’s just not in a way that I did my projects throughout school, so I feel like I need to adjust my mentality in this area.

Do you feel your project is on track to succeed? If not, what do you plan to do to get back on track?

I do think our project is on track to succeed, but I also think we need to put some extra work in to get it to where I wanted it to be at this point. My real goal is to have a working site with multiple pages by when the next progress report is due. That specific date is May 8th. A stretch goal is to actually have a working site on some level done by tomorrow, so that we can show our sponsor where we’re at and give her a cool demonstration of her vision coming to life.

For that to happen, I have to finish coding by the afternoon tomorrow. I know earlier I said I wasn’t gonna just grind out long hours of coding, and really try to put the work in consistently over multiple days, but I also have the rest of today free to code, so I think this is a good opportunity to do some of the catching up I was talking about. I’m going to end the post here so I can hopefully have a great site to show our sponsor tomorrow! (I promise I’ll be more disciplined in my coding after today!)

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this post, and hopefully I’ll see you in the next one!