Well, here it is. The beginning of the end. Or as I would prefer to describe it, the beginning of the real beginning. The capstone project to my 2 year OSU comop sci postbaccalaureate experience. And quite the auspicious start at that. I forgot to begin this blog yesterday and am turning it in a day late. (Sigh*). But all in all, I’m quite excited to use this blog as an opportunity to pause and reflect on my accumulated programming skillset and to gauge my job readiness — all while working on the last project I will turn into Oregon State.

This program has had some ups and down over the two years, as should any good, properly grueling learning experience, but I’m most definitely going to leave with a new skillset, new opportunities, and a newly sharpened problem solving toolkit. Reversing linked lists, rotating/rebalacing AVL trees, and simply acquiring more technology self-efficacy over the past two years has expanded what my brain can conceptualize and wrap itself around. I see this project as a good way to gauge how far I have come from the introductory programming classes from two years ago.

Oh right, the capstone project. Though I’ll most likely slip in some more self-reflection in future posts, I’ll just limit the scope of the rest of this post to my thoughts on project selection. From the list of projects provided us, my partner and I broadly categorized 6 selections based on our general level of interest and how ‘safe’ or broadly approachable they were given our know-how. These two aren’t necessarily diametrically opposed, but it as we parsed the brief of each project, we realized there was at least some inverse correlation going on.

The more ambitious looking projects related to AI and neural networks were the ones whose descriptions brought a glint to our eyes. (Or at least I imagined they did since we chatted over a phone call). These were the sorts of projects with all the techy buzzwords to get one riled up. More importantly, they’d require more independent research to fill in the relative gaps in our knowledge. Neither of us have taken linear algebra, so the nitty gritty fundamentals of matrix operations with respect to AI will be something for us to sink our teeth into should we acquire one of these projects.

On the other end of the spectrum, are the simpler social network clone types of projects that involve hashing out some CRUD and a database with nice, slick UI. These are nice summations of what was covered in web development and the introduction to databases class and there is never anything wrong with working on the fundamentals, but with incremental improvements.

The list provided to us also gave me a great list of ideas for solo project post graduation to further flesh out my portfolio. Even if we don’t get ‘neural network bitcoin trading bot’, this and other projects of this ilk are definitely something I’ll try to build on my own. I plan to apply to grad school in machine learning or AI and this is the perfect opportunity to get my feet wet and whet my appetite.