Author: Casey Hawkins

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Blog Post #3

The Third

For Blog Post #3, please blog about your project and answer 2-3 of the following:

  • How is the journey so far?

The journey has been interesting. Working with professionals in the industry has been eye-opening and informative. So far, the project has been slower-paced than our team originally anticipated, but the process of being given a task, not initially knowing how to go about completing it, doing research, proposing a solution, and getting feedback on that solution is proving to give a good glimpse into what the software development field entails.

  • What communication tools is your team using, and how well is this going?

Our team is using Slack. Communication with the team has been consistent, with a daily check-in from most teammates. Communication on Slack with the industry team is less frequent, about 2-3 times a week. We do meet every Monday at 3 PM PST over Zoom to discuss our progress and go over next steps.

  • What Project Management tools is your team using, and how well is that going?

No official project management tool, like Jira or Asana, is being utilized. Instead, the project is managed via communication over Slack, Zoom, or GitHub. I believe a more formal project management tool would prove very useful for our team but this idea has not been proposed, and at this stage of the term, probably will not be proposed or implemented.

  • How often does your team commit their code? Is code integrating easily?

Code is committed about once a week. So far, our team commits to the “develop” branch of the project GitHub, into a folder labelled “experiments”. This way, the code integrates very easily as it never is replacing or messing with existing code, but adding scripts and methods to parse a Word document into a json file that can then be added into the project database to update a broad field of possible industry fields and subfields. This will help the project meet its goal of matching funders with founders, and the more specific the categories can be, the better, as some funders have given feedback on how they are only interested in funding very specific, niche types of startups.

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Blog Post #2

The Second

Why did you and your team choose the technologies you did?

Our team is working with React.js, Material UI, Jumbo Theme and Vite.js for frontend, and PostgreSQL, Node.js, Nest.js, Fastify, Nestjsx, Typeorm, and TypeScript for backend. Our team’s role is more of a focus on backend and transforming large sets of data into more manageable formats. This project is an industry project, so the technologies were already chosen before our team was setup. These technologies were chosen due to their ease-of-use, reliability, and streamlining of frontend and backend features, such as simplifying UI design and basic CRUD operations.

How will your project use them?

Our project will use these technologies to display the webpage’s contents, allow users to signup/login, answer a questionnaire, and store each user and their questionnaire profile in a PostgreSQL database. These users will then be matched with other users using ML/AI (answers kept vague due to signed NDA).

What do you like or dislike about your system UI/UX?

The website is responsive, clean, and easy to navigate. The nature of the website is that each user must answer a lengthy questionnaire in order to be matched with other users. The questionnaire is thorough, and therefore this process takes a long time. However, the point of the project is to increase the speed of matching users by using ML/AI, and the alternative is lengthy amounts of time spent researching on your own, finding and meeting people on your own, etc. So while the process is lengthy, relatively it saves time and is a necessary component of the project.

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Pilot

The First

Hello World! I first debated on getting into computer science when I was a senior in high school, again as a sophomore in college when I took an Intro to CS course, and then finally a year after graduating from university with degrees in chemistry and philosophy with the original intention of going to medical school. I started this program in the Winter 2019 Term and I’m excited to graduate at the end of this term.

I haven’t chosen a project yet. I’m honestly overwhelmed by the choices. I feel like I could do any of them. The projects most interesting to me so far are the AR Arcade Classics and AR Popup Storybook Companion App since I’ve always enjoyed AR/VR and would enjoy making a mobile application. The AI/ML projects in stock market and bitcoin are interesting as investing has really blown up since the beginning of the pandemic a few years ago. I sure know I’ve lost some money in the market so maybe the trick is to let robots take care of the trading for us? Finally, locally I’ve seen a few jobs advertise embedded software engineer positions, so getting some experience from building an embedded software project could be helpful in landing a job.

Whichever project I end up with, I hope to learn a lot as I feel the majority of my experience in building projects so far is very heavily web development focused, Intro to Web Dev, Intro to Databases, and the Cloud Application Development classes all heavily leaned into this area so getting some experience building a project that’s not just a website would be great. Bonus points if the project ends up being something I can add to my resume, portfolio website, and GitHub!

I’ll end by briefly mentioning that I’m very much a team player. While I do work full time I always make time in my day to dedicate to class and, lately, LeetCode, so anyone can count on me to be holding up my end of the project and doing what needs to be done. I’m not too worried about working in groups because it honestly usually makes the projects easier as all of our heads together are better than one. I’m looking forward to meeting my teammates and making a cool project together.

If anyone is needing to reach me they can email me at hawkcase@oregonstate.edu.

Casey Hawkins

March 29th, 2023