Has it already been a week? Oh, how the time does fly. I don’t feel like I’ve had enough fun for the time to pass so quickly. Oh, well.

I have begun the initial preparations for the capstone project. Since last checking in, I have joined a group, chosen a project, and held our opening meetings to begin organizing the work.

I am quite excited to be working with my group. I managed to link up with two people with whom I have worked before. One, SC, I got to work with in my Software Development courses and he has been very fun and energetic. The other, MB, I’ve worked with in several courses over the last year. She is knowledgeable and holds a similar work philosophy to me. So far, I feel we three have complimented each other well.

This week, we have been working on our Project Plan. We have been assigned to create an application that facilitates pet adoption, styled as a dating website/app. This idea sparked our imagination as we consider the building blocks of a dating website and how they would change to facilitate pet-owner relationships. This project also gives us plenty of flexibility concerning implementation. Do we do a web app or a mobile native app? What style of database do we use? How do we host it? What frameworks will we be using? This week has been a week of questions, suggestions, and decisions. This process has been quite amicable and illuminating.

M, it would appear, already has a job working in web development. This has made her a natural leader as we work through the decision-making process. We’ve decided to make a web app with Node.js using the React.js framework. S and I have never used React.js, but M assures us it’s not too difficult to get the hang of, and it’s a joy to use. We’ve also decided to structure our project like a web API with a user-accessible frontend. I am grateful for this, as I am taking a course on API development at the same time, so I will be able to build familiarity and proficiency in the techniques from two sources.

Overall, I am excited to begin, and am itching to get to the code. I have to keep reminding myself that it will save us a lot of time and difficulty to take the beginning slow, plan things out, and be methodical.