Coming into this course, I wanted to make a presentable, resume-worthy project, or at least build some skills that would be beneficial to add to my resume. My hope was to be assigned to either a cross-platform or mobile application project to gain experience working with mobile apps. Up until then, my courses at OSU had only really covered web pages apps. I originally wanted to take CS 492 Mobile Software Development to learn about this side of software engineering, but it ended up not aligning with my schedule, so I knew I had to find a different way to learn the material. As a result, I was very excited when I was assigned to the Dating app for Animal Adoption project, which is both a mobile app (as agreed upon by my group) and a topic that I am personally invested in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew that there would be challenges associated with learning to build a mobile app from scratch, especially since this course is mostly self-guided. However, instead of scaring me away, this pushed me to take initiative into searching for different options then researching them to identify the pros\/cons and justify my decision in choosing one over the other (ex: Java vs. Kotlin vs. Python for mobile app development and SQLAlchemy vs. MySQL Connector for handling database queries). I then had to figure out the task of actually implementing whichever technology I chose. One of my first struggles was with setting up and organizing the GitHub code base. I wanted to construct some organizational structure instead of just having all of the files in one big folder. In doing so, I ran into issues with imports (which I learned was due to Python seeing them as basic scripts instead of modules). After figuring this out and finding a fix, I also practiced writing documentation to teach my teammates about how to configure their local python environments and navigate and work with the code base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though this process was stressful and nerve-wracking at times, I learned a lot from it and have continued to improve each week as either I or my teammates run into new problems. This built both my independence and confidence in finding solutions, which I view as my biggest success and greatest takeaway from this course. I realized that, while a course that teaches you how to do one specific thing or write in a specific language makes the learning process much smoother, I won’t have that luxury out in the real world. No matter which company I end up working at, I will have to learn new technologies on the go, and this course has definitely given me a good start towards that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Coming into this course, I wanted to make a presentable, resume-worthy project, or at least build some skills that would be beneficial to add to my resume. My hope was to be assigned to either a cross-platform or mobile application project to gain experience working with mobile apps. Up until then, my courses at OSU […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13769,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13769"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/13"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/linsamcapstone\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}