This week, we were assigned our groups and project choices! Luckily, I was able to get into a team for my number one choice: the dating app for adoption. Both of my team members are very kind, organized, and experienced. They both have professional experience with JS as full-time SWEs whereas my exposure is only from school so I will definitely need to brush up on my JS skills. Our team has decided to use Trello for project management and Github flow with a Github team repository. I’ve never used Trello before but it has been very intuitive so far and I have experience with Github flow from CS 362. We plan to use next.js/react for front-end which I don’t have much (or any?) experience with, but am eager to learn since I know it is used in many professional settings. For back-end development, we will be using Node.js, Express.js, and MySQL. Thankfully, I have experience using these from previous courses. Docker and dotenv are tools that will also be used, but I am not entirely sure of what they do and how they work yet. I am definitely nervous since there are so many things I need to research and learn/re-learn, but I am highly motivated because I know that these skills and experiences will help me to grow as a developer and hopefully land a job.
Speaking of jobs, I still have no idea what type of CS job I ideally would like to work. Of course I’ll take whatever I can get initially, but I’m having a hard time deciding where I want to end up. I love videogames and originally wanted to work as a game dev, but that dream quickly died after hearing so many employee horror stories and how the game dev industry is notorious for employee exploitation and mistreatment. Other fields I see myself possibly enjoying are UI/UX and web development/web design since I like designing and aesthetics, but I feel like there is still so much about those jobs that I don’t know.
Aside from the learning experience, I’m also excited to work on this project because I love the idea behind it. I have always loved animals and even wanted to become a vet at one point when I was a premed student. I also think adoption is very important and I am all for any way I can help support more animals in finding a family/home. I’m really looking forward to working with my group on this project and I will keep this blog updated with our progress once we start really getting into it.
