As we enter the last stretch of the course, I have begun to reflect back on my experiences thus far with my project and what has gone well and what I’ve learned along the way.
I big victory for me was working back-end for a major project. When I started this program three years ago, I knew mostly mark-up languages and dabbled a bit in python and javascript. Halfway through the program, I still felt incompetent and not comfortable with back-end and felt like I may not be cut out to be a full-stack programmer and that maybe my future was meant for design and front-end stacks.
Going into this project, my other teammates were most comfortable with front-end and I saw an opportunity to focus on back-end further. I had just gotten my feet wet with RESTful services and wanted to further practice my freshly learned skills from CS 491. I also spent a few terms TAing for CS340 as an effort to sharpen my back-end skills.
Normally in a project, once members learn that I am comfortable with design and front-end I get assigned to those roles, but this one was special in that I got to solely do back-end and no front-end at all, which was a first for me and an important endeavor for me to take on. Everything has gone swimmingly this term and I feel even more comfortable with back-end and cloud database systems.
Conducting a SWOT analysis on this course, my breakdown is as follows:
Strengths: Working on a team project gave nice practice to working on a small dev team in real life circumstances. I don’t normally get a lot of opportunity to work with others on projects, so this was a nice opportunity.
Weaknesses: I think that if it’s not required or ‘set up’ in the course, it can be easy to not have a good communication style, or one that accommodates every teammate. I think some members may need more check-in points to stay accountable, and if it’s not built in right in the beginning, it’s awkward to try and backpedal and make new guidelines for communication.
Opportunities: This course gave a nice opportunity to work on a full scale project and give experience working in different tech stacks and learn new environments.
Threats: I think that it’s hard to assess how much time it will take to do work or what is meaningful work, and figuring out how to appropriately portion out the work to teammates, so that it is equally divided. This can lead to teammates that are doing far less than others, due to it not being foreseen in the beginning when you’re estimating the workload.
Leave a Reply