I have finally made it to the end! It's been a journey but I'm so glad I've done it. The last week of this course is really only three days so there's not much of an update on our project. I made some final changes to the readme with setup details and that was about it.
There were some small assignments for the week to take a survey about the program, upload our project files, and finish adding files to our ILP website (you can see mine at ladymozzarella.weebly.com). We also had to finish our video for our online presentation. My team's video is below.
The very last step of the course that we have is to present our project at our online Capstone Festival this weekend. I expect that it will go well and I'm looking forward to having a relaxing Sunday with my family.
This past week has been so incredibly busy. My team has put in an insane amount of work on our project, with each member working every single night to get our project up to speed. In the end, I think we did very well. I focused a lot on getting our task kanban board working with drag and drop functionality to change task statuses and cleaning up the visual appearance of the application. Because we are presenting our applications this week, we all wanted to have something ready to present for this week.
In addition to getting our project ready for presentation, we have been working very hard to complete the final pages (~10 pages worth) of our final paper and clean up the formatting as well. A draft presentation was also due this week, making our week super duper busy.
I believe everyone is looking forward to next week and getting this final course wrapped up, like me. I have really enjoyed working with my team and getting to learn a new technology stack (Angular2 and Firebase) but can't wait to relax a bit after work and maybe even make dinner!
The following prompts were provided by CSUMB to guide me in my reflection on the ETS Major Field Test.
1. What have you learned from your ETS test results?
There is a lot of me to review. Many of the topics were familiar but I couldn't exactly answer them based on my memory of how to solve them. I probably need to focus on computer memory and computer architecture topics in the future.
2. What are your strengths and your weak spots shown from the test results?
As stated in the previous response, I struggled with the questions related to computer memory and computer architecture. They were familiar but I couldn't remember exactly how to solve them. There were also a few questions that I didn't recognize from any of my previous courses. My strengths were in the software design and algorithm questions. However, it's difficult to say because I didn't get a detailed breakdown of where I did or didn't do well.
3. What is your plan to leverage your strength in your career? What is your plan to remedy your weak spots?
I will pay careful attention when solving problems related to computer memory addressing. I know that these issues will come up in my line of work and it would be beneficial to understand it to the best of my ability. I can use my strengths when problems arise with something I'm working on or my coworkers are working that are related to what I do already know.
4. Do you think the test is valuable? How should the CS Online program be revised so the test results of our graduates will continue to rise?
I believe that this test is more valuable for the institutions that use the data than for myself. Without a detailed breakdown of areas for improvement, it's difficult to know where to focus my future studies in particular. However, the administering institution can use to gauge what they should focus on, assuming they get more information.
Many of the questions were focused on topics that I learned in courses taken outside of this particular program. It's difficult to place any responsibility on CSUMB for those topics since I didn't complete those courses through this program. However, providing pre-tests and required study materials for the exam may be helpful prior to students taking the exam itself. Personally, I struggled with the limited amount of time to answer the questions and found that I frequently ran out of time, which required me to simply guess on the remaining questions. I believe that preparing students for this aspect of the exam may be helpful.
My team has been working extremely hard this week to get our project back on track. I'm very happy with the progress we have made and believe that we can get something presentable this week. We're still behind but I think we've really picked up the pace. After spending so much time working with forms in Angular2, the Firebase database, and Firebase authentication, I'm confident that I can get much further on the project this week.
We also took the Major Field Test exam for computer science this week. It was proctored online and very challenging. It was very surprising how difficult it was but I think I could have done decently with preparation. The online proctoring was pretty strict and very interesting to participate in. I found that I ran out of time and had to guess at the end. It was pretty overwhelming. With more time, I could have done much better.
My score was very average. Based on the questions I struggled with, I think my memory management skills could be improved and some topics (like computer architecture) reviewed. However, I think I did well with the software design questions, database management, and data structures questions. After graduation, I may take a break from actively learning outside of work but will definitely continue to at least teach myself new topics in the computer science field later on.
We're in the homestretch! Just a few more major assignments to take care of and we're good. I'll be back next week with an update on how that is going.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
This week there was a lot of controversy concerning the following Burger King commercial, which triggers Google's "personal assistant" to retrieve information about a Burger King burger.
The advertisement uses the voice command "Ok Google, what is a Whopper burger?" to have a Google Home device or Android phone read the first line of the Wikipedia page for a whopper burger. Prior to the release of the ad campaign, the Wikipedia article's first line was changed to read "The Whopper is a burger, consisting of a flame-grilled patty made with 100 percent beef with no preservatives or fillers, topped with sliced tomatoes, onions, lettuce, pickles, ketchup, and mayonnaise, served on a sesame-seed bun." It appeared to be edited by Burger King's Marketing Chief. This commercial is the first to intentionally trigger one of these voice command devices.
Reason Chosen
We've seen a lot of reports concerning accidental triggers of these kinds of voice-activated devices. Most have been unintentional up until this point. I find this relevant because I own two Amazon Echo devices that work the same way. My boyfriend had a friend over and noticed the device on our side table. He triggered it by saying "Alexa, order me 100 units of toilet paper." I have purchased toilet paper through Amazon in the past and when I did so, I ordered a box of 48 rolls. Alexa quickly responded saying she was ordering 100 boxes and it was going to total at somewhere around $2,000. It's concerning that it can be that easy to order something so large from a device like this. The easy ordering feature has now been disabled on my devices.
Ethical Implications and Personal and Social Values at Stake
This advertisement initially seems innocent but can quickly spiral out of control. First, as mentioned in the article, Wikipedia pages can be edited by everyone and Google will blindly read out the first sentence, under the assumption that it is okay to read (based on Wikipedia community guidelines). However, the articles could be edited after the release of these products to say horrible things that may not be appropriate for the listeners. It could place a lot of people in various ethical issue territories.
Similar advertisements will likely arise in the future. My family tends to leave the television on for our pets when we leave. I can easily imagine a case where an advertisement causes one of these devices to order something unapproved by the owner. I feel as if the companies producing the commercials are actually hacking their viewers and not just the device. It places their audience in a vulnerable state.
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Jacob Kastrenakes has been working as a News Editor for The Verge since 2012.
