“Did you initially have doubts about your ability to complete the project? How do you feel now?”
I did have an initial doubt about my ability since I’ve mostly worked on projects of my own design and always worked alone. Working with GitHub and multiple people has been somewhat difficult since I will admit that I am not very proficient in many things. GitHub and version control has always been confusing mostly due to the terminology and how the different branches and versions work together. In the past, when I’ve had to use version control, I would keep the most recent and working version and if I screwed it up too much while making improvements, I would just revert it. Pushes, pulls, commits, branches, merges and the like just seem to confuse me if I don’t keep it very simple.
Another thing that made me worried was that our team decided on using MERN which I had no experience with. React and Javascript were almost completely foreign to me so much of my effort was towards learning it, experimenting, and revising. The progress was slow as a result which made me feel as though I wasn’t making any headway.
How I feel now is that if it were up to me, I wouldn’t do another group project in the same way that I have gone through this one. We lost 50% of our group during the course of the project which affected our efforts since we had to spend time reallocating responsibilities and increase our individual contributions. I would pick a language and structure that was more familiar though I can see their many benefits in hindsight. So in that regard I have learned and expanded my skill set thought the constant stress of being able to deliver a viable product was something I could do without. Overall, the project was sometimes messy, constantly stress inducing, frustrating, and gave me a Pavlovian repulsion to the Teams notification bell, but I have learned valuable tools as a result.
A skill that I’ve always had was the ability to dissect and experiment with code. This was useful in the project since I was responsible for creating the quiz prototype. This worried me greatly since it can be argued to be the meat of the project and one of the key elements of the entire project. This really worried me since, as I mentioned, I started off not knowing anything about the tools or environment we were using and I was expected to create a functional quiz from scratch with reactive responses based on user input and result calculation. I can say that this was not easy but I am proud of the quiz I created and the contributions to the project such as the README documentation. That was something that was really useful for me to do since I had to start from a place of complete ignorance and build instructions that anyone could follow to replicate and run our project for themselves. I also took over the major information page sections so I had to research information relating to all of the College of Engineering majors, compile them, and get a web page to display them based on active user responses.
All of this was very difficult but I can say that my main contributions to the website being the README, the quiz, the major information research, the major display page, and the about project page are things that I can be proud of.
