Upon reading the introduction to this course as well as the syllabus, I was overcome with a mix of excitement and nervousness. Excitement because this would be the culmination of all I’ve learned over the last one and a half years. I would be able to build something real and larger than anything I’ve built before. The idea of creating is very exciting. However, I also felt nervousness because I thought back to my first degree’s capstone project and how time-consuming and intense it was. While I’d like to think I’ve matured since then and would avoid many of my younger self’s pitfalls, the various warnings given by the course description about this quarter being fast-paced and self-structured did not help quash any nerves.
The minute this course started, it felt like at a snap of my fingers I was already in a group with a project picked out, having submitted a project plan and already working on the project itself. True to the warnings, this quarter is moving fast. While originally this may have exacerbated my nerves, I’ve felt quite the opposite thus far. I think a large part of the reason why I don’t feel that way is because of my team. We all have 4.0’s in the program which assures me that we’re all more than capable. We all want to graduate with a 4.0 which assures me that we will all put in the due effort. We all are taking other classes which assures me that we will be understanding of conflicts. Lastly, and most importantly perhaps, we all have jobs lined up already, and agreed to essentially do the bare minimum to get an A. All these factors have set solid and similar expectations moving forward which is incredibly important for teams.
Furthermore, I believe the background composition of our team makes us especially effective. One team member has extensive experience in front-end development and has agreed to take the lead on this. I, just coming off of taking databases and a web app based class, am fresh in developing databases and backends to interact with databases. Our last team member has quite the experience in project management which has already shown in his ability to organize us, our efforts, and our artifacts. Along a similar technical vein, he is taking the lead on CI/CD and hosting services.
Accordingly, we’ve split our tasks for the project to align with these strengths. Of course, we’ll still have to dabble in other areas and understand how each others’ components. We’ve submitted our project plan and fingers crossed it gets approved; in the meantime, we’ve begun working on our first week’s tasks. For me, that means setting up our Trello board with user stories and also setting up our database with PostgreSQL (which I’ve never used before). Things are looking good so far! *knocks on wood* Next week, I’ll be able to report on more technical content.
