This week marked the midpoint in my final semester at OSU and the “nervousited” feeling is ramping up. We had to present a compilation of our current project files alongside individual demonstration videos. I have been taking each week at a time, but seeing how much of our project has been implemented, it’s beginning to resemble an actual product. As I’ve said before, I haven’t had the time to work on meaningful side projects of my own, so this is the largest scale project I’ve worked on. I have always had pride in my projects in the various coursed I’ve taken at OSU, but this is on another level.

While wrapping up our files and code for a viable midpoint representation, we bumped into a myriad of issues. Since I am solely responsible for the mobile app, I haven’t had much direct interaction with my team’s code. Our interactions thus far have been relegated to sharing the same database where we post and retrieve relevant data for use within our particular application. Just as I was about to compile my work into a ZIP file one of my teammates asked if I knew why the website was having errors with one of our test cases. I was unsure, since I had tested the mobile app several times to make sure the midpoint presentation was ready. We went over the errors together and we realized I had altered some of my code, which worked wonderfully within the confines of the mobile app, but was breaking the website after the changes she recently made. Two worrisome hours of troubleshooting later and we were good to go.

Two days later I was preparing to record my demonstration video for the mobile app. After several false starts where I stumbled over my own words during the intro, I found my rhythm and was on a roll. While demoing the app my virtual Android device crashed, and I frustratingly started over after rebooting the device. I had never had it crash like that before, but flukes happen, so I soldiered on. Then it crashed two more times at various points in the demo. It seemed random and I couldn’t replicate the crash at the same spots. I eventually rebooted the device as well as my IDE and had a successful demo, but I couldn’t help but feel like lightning struck twice. I realized that this was probably a relevant experience to remember once I start my professional career. Things going smoothly up until a major deadline approaches, then all hell breaks loose. Thankfully my many years as a husband and father helped me maintain my composure through these anxious events.