Getting Stuff Done

Hello again! To cut right to the chase, since the last blog my group and I have made really great progress on our project. We’ve made good progress on critical aspects of the project, so things are going according to plan so far. For our project, we are making a mobile treasure hunt, that gets users outdoors to explore user created hunts.

For my portion I recently completed, I designed the active hunt screen. Between you and me, it’s the most important part of the app, so it was cool to have that level of responsibility. There are other important pages, but this is the key aspect of the app users will use the most. It has been hard learning Flutter, the learning curve is a bit high, but things are starting to click. It really comes down to knowledge of the widgets, because one might exist that you didn’t even know about!

The concept of stateful widgets has been probably the most complex part. This is when your app updates new information. Flutter re-loads that particular widget to update new information. It became really tricky as you could imagine with implementing a live map that tracks the user’s location and must update at all times. I went with the Google Maps API to assist me, although the documentation is surprisingly scarce. I think it is because Google offers this feature on a lot of different platforms, especially webapps, so Flutter took a bit of a backseat. In that sense it has been difficult learning how it works, so I had to piece things together with guides and videos.

Y’know, that’s kind of what software engineers do though! We figure things out that we don’t know. We know that we can know, if we need to. That’s what I’m taking away from this, and it has helped me gain a lot of confidence going forward. I’m ready to keep tackling more parts of the project. I’m happy with what we have so far.

Things have been hard lately because there is a headcount shortage at Google. A privileged position to be in, I know, but what went from a 99% chance of an offer as it usually is from passing the hiring committee, is now about 50% according to my recruiter and a lot of new graduates hearts will be broken. This has greatly taken away my productivity as I’ve been keeping up with a Discord of students in the same position.

At the end of the day, careers are long and it’s not the end of the world if I don’t get it, but it would be a shame most definitely. Tomorrow I plan to mentally step away from that anxiety and start blazing forward. Every day is a new day, even if you had a lazy day, you can always tackle the next day with full force. Hopefully in the next update I can share good news! For now I need to keep focusing on my project and making a good app.