Month: May 2023

How do you work through being “stuck” on a problem?

Since my team is focused on neural networks and machine learning, this would typically engage diverse types of methods for working with being stuck compared to prior methods we would have had for other projects for previous courses. The biggest key is to work in a highly systematic manner to find the solution to a problem or to work through being “stuck” on one. I work through what processes need clarification and the project plan and implementation. I assess the aspects of the problem and what is causing an issue for progress. Often with machine learning projects for instance, it is a result of a lack of access for quality data. It also helped to collaborate on how to implement a solution to a problem and to assess the different proposals from different team members on what could potentially be the most optimal solution.

How do you approach learning something new, like new technology?

The technologies that we are utilizing for our project are extremely new and each aspect of software for neural network modeling and machine learning has proven to be quite new for us. There were several approaches we took as a group and independently to learn the new technologies that we learned for our project. Fortunately, we were able to utilize the extensive documentation and learning resources that have been provided by TensorFlow, Keras, and OpenCV. What also benefited me was being able to also discuss the different technologies and their associated concepts with my team members for our group project. This allowed me to assess the best paths forward for implementing the various parts of the project that we are working on with the recent technologies that have been developed and provided for from various open source groups.

How is the journey so far?

We are making steady and observable progress towards the minor and major goals and objectives that we have implemented for our Capstone project. We are not at the final phases, but we are making excellent progress towards implementing the features that we are hoping to have completed for our project. Our team is great, and we are all working collaboratively to ensure that we can help one another achieve the objectives that we planned for each week.

What communication tools is your team using, and how well is this going?

We have been using Discord as our primary method of interaction. We have been using Discord as our mode of communication and so far, it has enabled us to collaborate and communicate effectively and efficiently with one another. It is great to be able to send a direct message to a team member at any given time and to respond when we can. We have scheduled weekly team meetings every week to review our progress with our project. Thus far, all team members have been highly responsive with one another, and we help one another out when assistance or support is needed.

What Project Management tools is your team using, and how well is that going?

Trello is our project management tool of choice. We were considering Asana as a potential tool for project management as well. However, when comparing between the two project management tools, Trello was the tool that we selected. While both are easy to use in their own ways, Trello was suitable for our purposes as it is more user-friendly in terms of setting a process to move a task through a systematic pipeline of tasks. The appeal of Trello is that it is also more of a visual project management tool, and we do not anticipate partitioning subtasks out as much as we would think.