We’re a few weeks into my last semester now, and things are going really well! I’ve made good strides in each of my classes and feel confident hitting the ground running on my assignments and projects. I’m using some technologies I’ve never tried before and polishing my skills in the ones I’m already familiar with.

For my group’s capstone project, we’re developing a crowd sourced travel planner web application. I’ve taken responsibility for all things databases for the project, and I’m excited to learn Postgres and Heroku for it. I honestly expected learning a new RDMS would be more difficult since I’ve really only used MySQL and phpMyAdmin for database management before this, but the learning curve isn’t steep at all if you’re already familiar with SQL terms and relational databases.

I jumped at the chance to be the team’s DBA since a large part of my job after graduation will be writing SQL queries. The company I’ll be working for uses Oracle instead of Postgres, but Heroku doesn’t support Oracle. I’m hoping the work I’m doing this semester will directly translate into my job in January and give me a good refresher on relational databases and SQL syntax, coordinating with a development team, and Agile and scrum project management.

My team is wonderful this term, and I’m very glad that I am getting to work with people I’ve already done projects with before. Already having that rapport and knowledge about each other’s strengths and skills has really allowed us to hit the ground running and divide the work in a way that suits us all individually and will hopefully result in the best version of our application. The clear division of labor and knowing that my team members are trustworthy from the beginning has made this a lot less stressful than I anticipated. I’m really excited to see where we go from here and share our finished project!