The Capstone So Far

It is hard to believe we are already through the first sprint of the Capstone Project! Going in to this class, I didn’t really know what to expect. Not only from the class and project, but also from myself. Had I learned enough throughout my time at OSU to be an impactful member of the team? Would I have any idea how to get an entire app built in such a short period of time? Am I even ready for the challenge? With such a short period of time to work on the project, there is no time to fall victim to the dreaded imposter syndrome. I knew we just needed to hit the ground running.

In the first sprint, my team made a pretty decent amount of progress. We are working on the Dating App for Animal Adoption and already have a bit of the complexity of the project figured out. This app helps match potential adopters with shelter animals and has a goal of increasing animal adoption success rates. I have an interest in backend development and have primarily focused on that thus far in the project. I was able to get all the routes created for CRUD operations as well as functionality to filter the list of pets based on user-entered criteria. I’ll probably do a little bit of additional testing on the routes this sprint, but that wraps up the majority of my backend work for the project. My next major task is going to be building the Animal Profile pages and I think I have a plan for how I will approach that.

My teammates have started work on the Admin Dashboard (where animal profiles can be managed), the Account Creation page, and the Sign-in page for potential adopters. Work on those pages should wrap up in the second sprint at which time the remaining pages will get started. Our plan is to have most of project, as well as some of the stretch requirements, finished by the end of the third sprint so we can shift our focus to thoroughly testing the app and fixing any bugs that pop up.

After completing the first sprint, I can definitely say that a lot of the skills I have learned at OSU have come in handy. I’ve been using quite a bit that I learned in the Web Development, Databases, and Cloud Application Development courses. One thing that actually ended up being a nice surprise is how some of my previous work experience has also been useful while working on this project. My first degree is in Marketing and I spent quite a bit of time in roles in which I managed marketing projects. I believe this experience helped with creating our project plan at the beginning of the course. Sometimes the most important part of a project is how well it is planned from the outset and I think our plan was comprehensive and set us up for success. I also have experience with tools like Figma and Mural, both of which have been used while working on this project. I guess that is really one of the exciting parts of being in a post-bacc program, we all have careers and education in a broad range of disciplines and can all bring different skillsets to the table.

At the beginning of this project, I really didn’t know what to expect from myself. It is definitely a large project that needs to be done in a very short period of time and that can be kind of scary. However, the first sprint showed me that, using both new skills and old skills, I’m ready for the challenge!

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash