Looking back on the past quarter and the progress my team has made in developing our mobile app I am proud and feel this has been the most rewarding experience of my OSU journey thus far. The amount of personal accountability involved in the project can be intimidating, but is what makes the experience all the more worthwhile. Our project mentor has been extremely helpful, but the whole team also pushed each other to meet our self imposed deadlines and goals for the semester. This personal accountability is what I feel allowed our team to succeed as well as it has. While no one has to chase people around to get their work done, there is a general feeling of responsibility to do your own work because you see your teammates consistently delivering theirs. I feel that this has shown me what it means to have a healthy and strong development team. Self paced, yet still meeting deadlines.
Another element that adds to my excitement is that I never would have expected to have gotten to where we are now with the project given my knowledge and understanding on day one back in September. Looking at the existing codebase in Dart and Flutter (having never seen or touched the language/framework before) and the seemingly complicated project structure I had no idea how I would even begin to write a constructive line of code. Fast forward to today I am now extracting widgets to refactor code and adding entirely new features to the app. The entire process has taught me a lot about how to efficiently self-teach a new language, and also how to do it inefficiently. Initially official code documentation seems dense and difficult to pick through, while stack overflow has options that are much more convenient. However, after encountering bug after bug where the fix that worked exactly for my problem was slightly different to existing fixes online, I settled on the fact that often the only way to get rid of a bug was to fully understand how the code works and why it currently isn’t working. For this there are very few substitutes for the official documentation, especially with Dart and Flutter.
Our progress so far has me very eager for what is to come in the final quarter of the Capstone project. I am excited to see where the app ends up and I feel it is being made for a very worthwhile cause (to assist wildland firefighters). While it would be great if the entire U.S. Forest service adopted the app and it became prolifically used, I am still happy with our progress as a group no matter the outcome and would never change the project I have worked on.
