Hurry Up and Wait…

Week 1 of a new quarter is always a busy time filled with anxious thoughts and busy fingers, almost incessantly logging into canvas, checking the calendar, and checking all of the due dates. This is my last quarter in the OSU Postbacc CS program and I knew it was going to be busy taking two classes: CS 467 and CS 372. 

I currently work full time as an Industrial Engineer which has kept me to only taking one class per quarter for the majority of my time in the program. Due to a possible opportunity in January, I made the decision to try and close out the program this quarter and take my last two classes. It is because of this decision and the busy first week we usually see in quarters that I tried to get ahead and find a team for CS 467 from my previous classmates. The problem here is the first week of the class is heavily dedicated to finding a team and choosing a project, which makes complete sense for all the students coming in solo. 

My team quickly set up communications on the first day of the course and chose the direction we want to go for our tech stack. Two of us will use C#/.NET in full time work so we settled there. The entire team wanted to learn React as it is a very popular choice in industry. After agreeing on this direction, we quickly browsed our project options, submitted our surveys, and…. well that was it. Now we are anxiously awaiting when we can move on to the next step. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure we all love not being bombarded with tasks right as class starts but we built ourselves up to attack this project with fervor and now we are a bit subdued. My main concern is getting complacent and dumping all of this energy before we actually get to start on the project. 

I know our team will be able to move forward as soon as teams are fully assigned and the projects are released! I’m very excited to learn some new technologies with my team and work together to produce a great Capstone project! In the mean time we will be brushing up on our skills and getting introduced to the technologies we want to use for our web application. For .NET Core, I’m exploring all of Microsoft’s documentation as it is actually very good, starting with the tutorial here: Tutorial: Create a web API with ASP.NET Core. React has a wonderful tutorial as well, but I know this just scratches the surface. Luckily, one team member found an awesome Udemy React course that we all have access to now to explore. The tutorial can be found here: Tutorial: Intro to React.

This is going to be a tough quarter, but I’m excited to take it on head first with this team! Make sure to follow along here for all the rants and raves I have about my journey through CS 467.