Programming is a satisfying process. Something about grabbing a cup of coffee and sitting down in front of a computer to work on a programming assignment; either personal or for school (haven’t done it professionally yet). But the vast majority of my past programming projects have been solo; till now of course. I am realizing more and more that our capstone project is definitely a team endeavor.
I haven’t worked professionally as a software developer, so all of my programming projects to this day have either been school or personal projects. But to an extent, I really have enjoyed working solo. I didn’t have to worry about making a big mistake on GitHub where a bunch of my teammates code will get erased or just angering a teammate for one reason or another. The only two projects where I’ve had a group was for the database course and software engineering i and to a lesser extent software engineering ii. But out of all those previous courses only software engineering i involved more group work. However, each member in the group worked on their own individual project and the only group part was implementing micro services for our teammates.
So here we are, in our capstone project where I truly feel like the emphasis is to learn how to work in a group. Here we all have to decide which languages and technologies we want to use, which repo service we want to use, which team member will work on what and how much time to dedicate each week, etc, etc. This of course adds more variables when working on a project; it’s no longer a solo project.
I think I still prefer working solo, but I do understand the importance of working in a group. It’s important for various reasons but the most important reasons are: (1) Some projects are just way too big for one person to create on their own (we’ll see ChatGPT?) and an army of programmers is just necessary. (2) One learns faster working with others. Yeah, I’m finding this out right now, my team members are bringing up technologies that I haven’t heard of and I’m learning about them trough them. So, just because I still prefer solo programming, doesn’t mean that I’m not enjoying working with a team for our capstone project; its been fun so far.
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