I’d like to bring up some highlights of the online Capstone course (CS467) during the Fall of 2023.

Strengths

• Great introduction in the post-bacc program to working with a larger team than just a partner project.
• Strong outcome of the course for students is strong communication skills. Without communicating well during the project, then the entire team’s progress tends to suffer.
• Tons of great project ideas. The hardest question for newcomers coming into the Software Development field is “what should I build”. So the fact that there are lots of interesting projects, and even projects that where you could be working with industry/sponsor code base is even better.

Weaknesses

• Accountability of others for completing tasks. No negative benefit of not completing tasks, other than project goals becomes further delayed.
• I found out mid way through the course about the Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) which I would have been a lot interested in. Maybe that should be better advertised somewhere within the first week so that gives time for those interested/accepted to drop in/out of the course?

Opportunities

• Mandatory live quarter check in with the team. Was thinking it’d be a good idea to have a live session with the team to gauge the overall process/progress of the team in a synchronous environment rather than asynchronously. It also allows the team to engage with the professor/teaching assistants.
• Someone could make an application to help with recruiting teammates for this course. The information would be “live” in a sense that you can add POST yourself, project preferences, contact (email, discord, etc.) and skill set. Then later people can PUT or update their own status on if they found a group or not, or otherwise delete their “looking for group” entry. The “looking for team” board would also be searchable and can be filtered on.
• Enforce project management. Initially tried to do sprints, however that died off after a few weeks. This could be a learning opportunity for those wanting to land a job in the industry to be familiar with scrum, agile, and keeping tallies on the expected work to be completed.

Threats

• No major threats I’ve identified in this course!

Since starting this project, I think my favorite technology has got to be Vite (pronounced as VEET). Its been making creating changes and updates in React a breeze with the instant live updates upon saves (hot module replacement). So whenever you’re making a change, with React such as creating a new components, or any styling changes, you can see the change on the dev change immediately take effect instead of having to rebuild every time and re-running.

Its also used as a bundler to make deployment a bit simpler. A bundler grabs all the css and javascript files and puts them into a single css and js file. This also makes for faster responding applications.

Those are the first noticeable changes I’ve found with our current development of the “Thomas Batterman Mental Health Project” website redesign. I’m hoping that as our project grows, the build time remains close to the current 3.47 seconds.

Something that could be improved is the documentation explanations. I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why my deployment to GitHub pages was not working when I structured my client and server folders in the same repository. However they did have a Vite Discord that had some suggestions where others faced similar issues.

I actually started a blog of my OSU journey last Winter 2022 to write about my experience taking several courses via the post-bacc program. I’ve completed all courses except for my last elective (CS450 Intro to Graphics) and the capstone (CS467), both of which I will be taking this Fall quarter. So far I’ve really enjoyed everything. The professors are all really responsive and they really want you to succeed. The unofficial Discord community has been great for laughs, struggles, and filled with people that also want you to succeed.

My son is now 18 months old and has been my heart and motivation to finishing this program. I remember doing assignments in the same room as him late at night, as he would lay in his crib sleeping. Now that he’s older, we gave him the room to himself and moved my workstation to my own bedroom (which he loves to barge in to smash on the keyboard).

Since last year I’ve received two internship opportunities where I got to work in agile environments. One as a software developer and the other as a full stack developer. Before that I worked in the aerospace test industry where I worked in multi disciplined teams which required strong communication for time critical responses. For this capstone, I’m hoping to work with a strong team, that will leave a fun and lasting memory as I will be graduating at the end of the quarter.