Matt Kerr Capstone Blog

This week, I met with the Project Sponsor Jim Cupples and talked about the project for the first time. We outlined some requirements, and went over the big picture concept for the project. He showed some similar projects that he had done in the past, so that we could look at similar websites that he had made. Looking at the sites definitely helped us to get a good idea for what we will be doing. I am really excited to get started working on the next phase of the project after I finish the requirements document, and I look forward to working with all of my project partners to set up the best possible environment we can to get this project done. I also look forward to working with Jim, because he seems like a very knowledgeable person, and he has a lot of experience with similar projects that we can draw on.

Hello, and welcome back to my blog.  This week, I put a lot of time into figuring out my project and getting set up.  I met with David Kalcic, one of my other group members, and we established communication standards and the general operating rules for our project group.  I am excited to work with him on this project, since he seems like a smart guy who also does not get bogged down in the little, unimportant details.  Unfortunately, I was not able to meet with our third group member yet, since he has not shared his contact info yet, but we will talk to him when we meet with the project sponsor.  David and I emailed the Project Sponsor this week, and we got a few more details on the project, as well as a request for a meeting on Monday at 10 to discuss project requirements, etc.  Unfortunately, I was not able to organize a meeting with the Sponsor, Jim, before the Problem Statement was due, so I had to decide on the problem based on other example problem statements, the project description online, and the emails back and forth that I have had with Jim.  Working on this assignment has gotten me excited for the project, because even without a full project outline, there are still so many different aspects to this project to explore.  I am really looking forward to the meeting on Monday when we will be able to figure out the full scope of this project and start to come up with a plan for implementing a solution.  Until then, I will keep trying to contact our third group member, and I will keep doing as much research as I can on both election information gathering and web development tools that we might use.

The first week of classes has been a good opportunity for me to get prepared for all of my classes this school year.  I finished moving into my new place this week, and we finally organized the new house.  I really like my new room, mostly because I have a larger desk now, so there is room for 2 monitors.  I really enjoyed looking at the capstone projects this week too.  I didn’t realize there would be so many, so it was cool to look through real world applications of computer science and think about what I would be interested in.  The two that really stood out to me were the NODE project, which seems like a really good way to help American and potentially wordwide democracy using CS, and the wine blockchain project, which seemed really interesting, especially because I don’t know a lot of the ways that CS is being integrated into different industries, especially the farming industry.