Our project is the CoE Major Exploration Game. It’s a project to create a website with an interactive element to help new students research potential majors in the College of Engineering. We opted for a website with a quiz that will narrow down the potential options for students based on their interests, personality, etc. So far it’s been a little daunting for me personally since I’ve never really worked in a group before when building things like websites. It’s not the cooperation or communication, that’s been going great. It’s the structure since I’m not really familiar with certain procedures or processes when it comes to web design. I’ve created websites in the past but there wasn’t a great deal of structure such as tech stacks.
Overall, my team is great. Good people with a solid background and a drive to accomplish things in this project. We compliment each others shortcomings when it comes to the work. One of our team members however transferred to another project so there’s just the three of us now. No drama or any other such occurrence, just a transfer to work on a project they felt they were better suited for. Our first few documents worked out well since we were able to simultaneously collaborate in Google Docs when writing.
We’ve stood up the GitHub repository and have begun working on the main meat of the project. I’m a bit nervous since I’ve only used GitHub twice before, by myself, and in both instances, I was successful but I found myself wrestling with the branches and commits more than the code itself. I have something of a classical approach to creating software. I make it as modular as possible and test each module separately. If a module doesn’t work then I rewrite it until it does work. It was never a problem because I never worked in a group before. The other thing that gives me pause is the use of the MERN tech stack since the last time I used it was four years ago in a single class and I have virtually no memory of it. I’ve started to try and relearn some things through online tutorials and hopefully that will make me a more effective contributor to the team.
I’ve setup Microsoft Teams across multiple devices that are always running in my life so that way I can stay in contact as much as possible since many of our team members live in different time zones and it can be hard to remain in contact. Overall, I’m hopeful since building a website in and of itself isn’t necessarily difficult. It’s the overall collaboration with processes and tools that I have little to no experience with that make me feel uneasy. Luckily my team and I will help each other.
