CST 499 Week 5

Week 5

I spent every night this week wrapping my head around navigation with Angular 2 and storing data with Firebase. My team is very behind in our work and I wanted to ensure that I helped create as many initial pages as possible so that we can all contribute in parallel in different areas to help us get further along. It is still taking a long time for us to get up and running but I think this week we can get a lot done now that we have the foundation set.
The additional assignments have made it very difficult to solely focus on the capstone and get our essential features done. I know that 8 weeks is a short time and I thought I was prepared for it but I really was not. I plan on working on our project every night this week to get us into a position where we would have something presentable, especially since we're already gearing up for our final video presentation and beginning our last section of the final paper. On to the next week!

CST 499 Week 4

Week 4

This week ended up being a lot more tough on me than I thought it would be. I had taken some days off for commencement and expected to get more work done on our capstone project than I did. The commencement ceremony and events surrounding it were great, but definitely took up all of my time this week. We additionally decided to put our family pet dog, Benson, to sleep and it was a rollercoaster of emotions for me in a short period of time. However, the support of my family has really helped.

I'm going to spend every night possible catching my team up on this capstone project and get us in tip top shape in the upcoming weeks. My recent contributions have been lacking in substance, which is disappointing. My team, however, has been doing a fabulous job keeping up. Next week I hope to have a more exciting update.

CST 499 Week 3

Week 3

The assignments this week were time-consuming. If the workload progresses this way, I am worried about not being able to spend enough time on my team project. I am relieved, however, that I have two great team members that have put a ton of work into the project on their own. We all have very busy lives and are squeezing in school as at is. All of the additional moments spent on things that aren't our project feel like precious moments that slip away. In addition to working on the project, this week we reviewed resumes and LinkedIn profiles for our classmates, finished the first third of our final capstone paper (~10 pages worth), and created a silly little commercial for our capstone project. Here is the commercial for our capstone project:



The project itself is coming along but I'm feeling pretty behind. I've taken some days off this upcoming week for the commencement ceremony (woo hoo!) and I hope to squeeze in as much dev time as possible. I'm also hoping that this upcoming week is a bit lighter in the regular coursework department, especially since I have 12 hours of drive time coming up to get to Monterey. I'm certain we can get caught up if I can find the time to work on it. I'm considering taking a vacation day from work near the end to purely focus on it if I feel I need to.

I find myself getting caught up focusing on the little details, like linters, testing frameworks, and setup and not getting actual pieces implemented. I may implement some features and then return to unit tests once we have some more of our project working.

CST 499 Week 2

Week 2

This week was busy. I focused on creating the backend project for my team's task tracker application, InScope. Setting up the routes in addition to the "Hello World" route took a while because we wanted text and json responses to come from the endpoints. The initial database schema was setup using the Sequelize ORM, which was lacking in documentation and support, and created the appropriate database for it, locally. In addition to that, I added some developer friendliness to the application by updating the javascript to ES6, adding a javascript linter, and git commit hooks to enforce the linter.

We had a lot of plans for this week and weren't able to complete them. I'm hoping that this week and over the weekend I'll get more features added and we can start chugging away at the code base. My team members have been great with setting up the front end and login system using Google, along with the mockups for the application. I think we're going to do well and will get further in the coming weeks when we're all familiar with the technology stack.

Filling in my "ILP" website took a long time because I couldn't remember how to run many of the final projects for the past courses or what the final projects even were. After an entire day devoted to it, I finally got it. You can check it out at ladymozzarella.weebly.com!

The team meetings are going well. We meet briefly on Sunday nights. I think the largest takeaway that I gained from the reading last week on effective meetings is to come to the meeting prepared and with a plan. Each of us had goals and questions we wanted to be answered and were able to get what we needed from these meetings.

This class has been really flexible so far and I look forward to seeing what we produce in the next week!

CST 499 Week 1

Week 1

This week we read an article about how to hold effective meetings. There was some useful material in it that I will definitely consider as my team begins holding our regular check-in meetings for this course (we've decided to meet every Sunday). Of the recommendations provided by the article, the most important thing for us to do is set goals for the meetings and know what we want to accomplish when we get together. There were several suggestions that were more applicable to meetings in larger workplaces, but many of them were applicable to our smaller meetings. In addition to setting goals for the meeting, I believe it will be useful to follow the suggestions to postpone a meeting if the crucial members are unable to participate, define a meeting follow-up plan, which could include setting deadlines and assigning someone to each follow-up task and follow up with participants before the next meeting.

We decided on a technology stack for our project, which was the primary focus for us. We're going to be writing everything in Typescript/Javascript, using Express for our backend framework (running on Node.js) and Angular for our frontend framework. Our database will be created using PostgreSQL and we're going to use Bootstrap as our CSS framework, at least initially. Ken has created our initial database schema and set up accounts for hosting, I've begun work setting up our backend framework and Chris is working on our initial frontend code. This upcoming week we will begin working on the project itself and some of its features. Everything appears on track at the moment and I'm looking forward to getting up and running with it.

Working with these JavaScript frameworks is completely new to me and I look forward to being able to apply what I learn in this project to my career.