We’re off to the races! I’ve had the pleasure of meeting my team and project sponsor this week and so far I’m excited! My team has been great at communicating and we seem to gel well; I tend to be a bit nervous for any group work in this program because it can be difficult to randomly match people who have similar interests and drives. I’ve had some really incredible teammates in this program and I’ve had some teammates that were difficult to get a hold of which causes a fair amount of stress. I try to exercise patience in the 2nd case as you never know what someone has going on in their personal lives; they could be working long hours to make ends meet while completing classes, dealing with a personal tragedy, or really anything. I think it’s important to keep this in mind when working with others, whether it’s in the professional or academic setting.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a bit of anxiety looking at the assignment schedule and seeing a demo of our industry project. It feels like everything is already moving so quickly and our project has a lot of work to be done to be completed. Our project has a working demo of a desktop application version; our job is to create a cloud based version and begin adding additional features. I need to take a step back and remember that we are not taking this project from its current state to production as that is more work than we could complete over multiple quarters. We will just be adding a few features to continue pushing this project towards completion.
This project was started by a previous capstone group so I think it will be a good experience to add to an existing code base instead of starting from scratch. In all my previous work in this program I have built from the ground up, so I look forward to this different experience. It seems valuable to learn an existing code base and add to it as I imagine that is the majority of what software engineers do in a professional environment. Here’s to hoping for a well-documented codebase to build upon! Our industry sponsor mentioned that he hopes to have future capstone teams continue our work, so I plan to do my best to write clean code for future students.
One of the initial hurdles that I am hitting is adding to an existing code base in a language that I have never used (C#). Typically in this program when we have been introduced to a new language, you start with the basics and build up. The C# code that I am reviewing is from our industry partner, Levrum, so utilizes some advanced C# functionality. This feels a bit like I’ve been thrown in the deep end when I don’t even understand the basics. I know it will cause a bit of pain at first, but this again feels like an invaluable experience that many software engineers have to deal with in industry. It never hurts to get some exposure to a new language or technology, just have to take it one line of code at a time.
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