Month: January 2023

I enjoy coding. Learning new knowledge and completing a project successfully excite me the most. However, life is not always full of joy. Problems and bugs will never be absent in every development process. Especially when working in a team, you might have chances to meet some peculiar problems that are caused by an unexpected thing. If bugs and problems are inevitable, why not treat them as a learning process? I am going to share a new problem I met recently.

A New Problem Occurs During Environment Setup

This quarter, I started work on my Capstone team project. Our team decided to use a popular technical stack (MERN) to create a Job Tracker web app. Early this week, I took charge of the environment setup. I checked several online tutorials, built and test locally, push them into Github Repository and then send the setup instruction to our group chat. Later on, one of my teammates reached out to me and said the Frontend did not work properly on her end unless she made a change on a line in the client-side package.json.

I tried to reproduce this problem on my side, however the code I wrote worked properly on my end. Then I changed this line to her code, and the weird thing happened. The code that worked on her side did not work on my end. Curiosity caused me to google this problem. Finally, I found the problems were caused by the different operating systems. The syntax I used only works on Linux and macOS. The syntax which worked on her side is for windows.

A Bit of Thought

It is a new and interesting problem for me since most of the projects I did before are individual projects. When I did research about the MERN stack setup, I only paid attention to the mac version info. I didn’t expect this problem to be caused by different syntaxes on the different operating systems.

I guess I should consider more when working in a team. Instead of starting working on a task immediately, I should take some time to think about what kind of factors might cause issues so that I could be careful when working on the task.

Photoed by Ru Yang, Fall 2022

Hi, There!

My name is Ru. I used to work in the logistics industry for around three years before starting the Post Bacc Computer Science program at OSU. I started this program in the Fall of 2020 and it took me around two and half years to arrive at the final course – Capstone. After graduation, I will start my first full-time Software Developer job. I feel it is time to talk a bit about my career switch.

About the Switch

Not like people who already have a specific career plan in school, I did not think too much about my career after getting my previous degree. I was referred by one of my friends to the logistics industry. I would say it is not a bad choice. Because it is stable, less-pressure, and has a work-life balance.

There are usually a lot of different factors that drive the decision. For me, the most important one is that I want more challenges. At the beginning of my previous job, I did learn a lot. However, as time passes, I started doing the same work every day following the operation procedure. It forced me to start thinking if that was what I want to do.

A career switch is a big decision for everyone. It did not occur smoothly and quickly for me as well. It took me half year to make the final decision. In the first stage, I did a lot of research on major selection and narrow it down to computer science, finance, and data science. After that, I took several online intro courses in those three areas separately to make sure which one I am interested in most. Finally, I consulted several friends who are software developers and want to have a basic concept of this industry.

About the Future

Last Fall, I started my job hunting. I got a lot of tips and inspiration about interview preparation from the discussion board in the course CS 361 Software Engineering. After several months of stressful but interesting interviews, I finally got a new grad offer in my target area. It is an end, but also a start.

Being new to my professional career, I believe that there will be so many things that I have to learn. It makes me feel excited! I set a three years goal for myself. In the first two years, I want to enrich myself and make up the gap between school and industry. In three years, I see myself having the capability to lead and own multiple projects from end to end. Till that time, I will have a more comprehensive understanding of my work area. Then, I want to go deep into this technical area to see how far I can reach.