Prompt: Discuss your biggest success during the course. What was your breakthrough, and why did it matter? What did you learn, about the technology, and also about yourself?
A lot has happened in my CS 467 course. There were a variety of readings, assignments, discussions, and the main component, the capstone. I enjoyed this class a lot. The readings were a good refresher on things that I went through in my college career. I also liked that there were these low stress readings on the side of the capstone. So I wasn’t only working on the capstone 24/7.
My capstone is a dating app for animal adoption. This app will match shelter animals with potential adopters. I liked that the project had some requirements to help us understand the delivery. But it was completely free for my group to implement the delivery anyway. We’re free to use any technology, deliver the app on web or mobile, and design the features however we want (as long as we meet the requirements of course).
In the capstone project, there were many technologies that went into it. Some of which includes hosting a server, software to take backend commands, a database to hold information, and a dynamic webpage for the user to accomplish tasks. The breakthrough would be connecting different programs. My “aha” moment happend when I finally had a working program that took multiple technologies to work together. The html rendered the page, Flask orchestrated the function, our database recorded and pulled information. I finally saw a new account was created and that same account can login and view pages.
This was the breakthrough because this was a big thing that happened and began the snowball for the rest of the functions. The technology I learned was Flask. Even though there the other technology was just as heavily used. I continued to use the other software that I’ve used the last 2 years at Oregon State University. Flask was the new one I’ve never used. I’m able to use it to run programs that I and my team coded. I also learned to use syntax to call variables back and forth with other softwares, such as html and python. It feels great to be able to learn quickly and use technology that is foreign to me. This is important to me because I know there will alway be new technology that I need to master from project to project.
This might be cheesy, but I learned that I am more capable than I thought. I’m the perfectionist type, the ‘all or nothing’ type. I always plan to learn everything first, then code the program. This capstone pushed me to be efficient while learning new programs. I had to learn while designing the project. I never would have imagined that I can make so much progress.
During this blog, I’ve been wondering “what could have been my breakthrough”. I wondered if I could have worked harder. I know I had some personal, family struggles in my last few quarters. Would finding a job be the right thing to do? Would I have pushed myself to burnout? I’m not sure. But I’ll do my best to wrap up this quarter and plan out my job search during spring break.
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