CST 499 - Week 8

This week we spent our time working on the final presentation and preparing for the capstone festival. It was interesting to finish up this course and I am looking forward to the meeting on Saturday. Looking back this capstone went by quite quickly but feels like a lot of effort and work was expended on it. It is bittersweet to think that this may be my last entry into this journal which I have been working on for two whole years now. I hope to be able to use some of the skills I have garnered from my time at CSUMB in the workplace soon.

CST 499 - Week 7

This week we finished out project final report. It was quite interesting to go through and catalogue how our project has come out through these past few weeks. I enjoyed the process and am happy with a lot of the interesting things I have learned in these few weeks. We also finished our first version of a presentation video for this weekend’s presentations. I think mine came out well, it has been a lot of work completing all the tasks for the capstone in a solo project, but I feel that it has been more worthwhile that way as I can call my entire project and process my own.

CST 499 - Week 6

This week we had our final meeting regarding our capstone project. It went well and we covered the plan regarding our final presentation that we will be working on this next week. We also took the ETS exam this week which was interesting to go over.  I think I may need to study up more on networking and some of the more low-level hardware aspects of computing from some of my experience. I also believe that algorithms and functions seem to be one of my stronger suits from my experience. I had quite a bit of trouble working with the proctors prior to the exam. It took a total of 6 or 7 proctors and an hour and a half before I was able to finally take my exam. I continued working on my application and have a fully functioning version working currently I was able to also start on user tests and got a lot of positive feedback and interest in the project, which was very encouraging.

CST 499 - Week 5

This week was fairly interesting. It is incredible how fast the capstone has been going by. I began working on joining the back end and front end of my project. It is I believe close to being completed with hopefully just a few more days of effort put in. I was able to implement a google sign-in features to address some of the ethical concerns and also to possibly build upon if I so chose later on. We took our ETS practice test and will be scheduling our full test later on this week, which I am looking forward to. Overall it was a pretty good week.

CST 499 - Week 4

This week we completed our Individual Learning Plan Portfolios. It was really rather exciting to look back at all the work that we have completed in such a short time and see how far I personally have progressed in terms of skills and knowledge gained. I have been applying to a few different positions recently and I think that my effort placed in my ILP and resume are definitely helpful in my professional endeavours. My project is coming along well, as I have a working static version of the application currently. Hopefully this next week I can begin to connect it to a live database and start seeing results.

CST 499 - Week 3

This week we spent time on updating our LinkedIn accounts and working on resumes and mock cover letters. It was really interesting to look at how others wrote and organized their history of work, and I gained some inspiration from others. Everyone has some very interesting backgrounds and histories that have been going through the program, and often already have fairly impressive experience behind them. I enjoyed the work on my own resume and LinkedIn account and learned from some of the suggestions from this week's reading. Overall the project is doing well, although I was not able to get as much progress as I had hoped for this week.

CST 499 - Week 2

Last week’s reading was quite useful to me. It solidified a hunch I had about the need for extra effort prior to and after a meeting in order to ensure that the whole meeting was worthwhile and effective. At my own work previously a lot of meetings have often felt underprepared when the person who called the meeting spent most of the time ensuring we were all on the same page on the topic at hand. The advice for continual follow up also seems very important in this fast paced workplace environment and I hope to implement these suggestions into my personal workplace meetings soon. I have already discussed some of these ideas with coworkers, and they all seemed quite excited to take the initiative the next time it is one of our turns to pilot a meeting.

CST 499 - Week 1

This week we read the article on effective meetings. I found the information to be quite interesting, and I believe they will definitely be helpful for teams. I think that having a clear goal for a meeting, and then coming to the meeting prepared with that goal in mind, is probably the one of the most important aspects to grasp for an effective meeting to occur. I know in my workplace that we try to have clear goals and ideas prior to meetings, and will prepare with each other prior to attendance. It is also important to follow up after meetings to see if the decisions reached and objectives set are being achieved. I find it interesting when considering meetings how much hangs upon work prior to and after the meeting itself, even though it is the focal point of that activity.

CST 438 - Week 8

This week concluded our course. We took the final, which was our last assignment in the process. Overall I enjoyed the course, it was quite a learning experience. It feels like it went by really quickly and that we covered a lot of ground, but I enjoyed it. It was truly a great hands-on learning experience, especially getting to work alongside my team and have regular meetings and a chat room where we congregated and discussed pressing matters, the design of the project and what needed attention at the moment. I learned a lot spending time with the team and utilizing github’s branches for the project as well.

CST 438 - Week 7

This week we began wrapping up our project for final submission. We each worked hard to implement various design patterns into our project for the assignment. I worked on implementing dependency injection in the Alert Controller project and as part of that created a database and database management file along with an updated set of alert controller test cases to ensure that they tested properly with the dependency injection. We all got together and ensured the completion of our various patterns and their accuracy. It was really interesting to work on the project overall with all my teammates one last time. It seems like it was just yesterday when we were first getting to know each other at the start of our program.

CST 438 - Week 6

This week we started our foray into Design Patterns and their application. We spent time this week studying some of the many various patterns that have been established for use by designers and are working on implementing designs into our own project. As part of the reading this week we were supposed to study a variety of different design patterns. I decided to look into the Filter, Bridge, Facade, Mediator, Iterator, Observer, Strategy, MVC, Singleton, and
Prototype Patterns. I thought the Bridge was an interesting pattern to learn about in particular as the bridges allow for the functionality of the concrete classes to remain independent of the interface implementing classes, I also was surprised by some of the similarities between the Mediator and Bridge Patterns. One pattern that stood out to me was the Facade Pattern and it seems like this is one pattern that developers may implement without even knowing it as many of the “under the hood” methods and functioning are often hidden from the end user as they utilize an entirely different interface with the program. It was also nice to study up on the MVC pattern, which I believe my team and I will be working on this next week, we’ve had a few things come up this past week but are planning on setting aside a few days to work on the project together.

CST 438 - Week 5

This week was an interesting one. I had a few things pop up in my personal life that made things a little hectic for a brief period during the week. But the instructions were quite interesting this week as far as homework went. Some of the team, including myself, were somewhat unfamiliar with the tasks necessary for the coursework as well as the stack we are using, but luckily AB aided us in getting up to speed and walked us through the how to set up our environment and get started working on the project and how to write the test units for the project. We worked together on the unit tests on our branches for the project.

CST 438 - Week 4

This week we had quite a bit of reading and videos to cover for our assignments. It was interesting to go through and see others research about what were some of the most common reasons for failures in a project. The disasters that can result from misunderstandings and miscommunication are quite apparent and the emphasis for the need to clarify and comprehend each other when working with others was glaring. It was also interesting to see just how important the creation of requirements are in the beginning, and through the lifespan, of a project. Miscommunication, unclear requirements or a lack of all the necessary stakeholders can doom a project to failure even before production can start. This week we had a group project consisting of creating diagrams for our upcoming project. It was nice to work with everyone and hammer out a schedule to meet and work on tasks.

CST 438 - Week 3

This week we had quite a few interesting articles and videos to cover for our assignment. We covered “white box” testing which is an interesting and seemingly straightforward way to test a program. There was some testing called EP/BVA which was very new to me with its boundary checking which was a little weird to think about given the example application. I did have a little trouble understanding what the author was meaning in some of the questions that had grammatical errors, but overall it was an interesting and worthwhile article. We also are starting to get into stride on our project, deciding when to conveniently communicate and where to start working on the project.

CST 438 - Week 2

This week we met with our teammates and began deciding what we would like to work on for our project. We have decided to build a cryptocurrency price tracking site where a few different currencies will be displayed with data relating to their real time pricing. Also there will be a subscriber form for people to be notified by email when a specific currency reaches a certain price. We have our repository, slack and pivotal tracker set up and I believe it should be a good project to work on.

CST 438 - Week 1

This was the first week of our new course, CST 438. It looks like it is going to be quite interesting, and involve quite a bit of both individual and group projects. It was interesting this week to get started with AWS and launching, and signing into, our first instances for practice. Reading up on the Plan and Document style and the Agile style were both quite informative in regard to how a company and team will operate together to work on actual large-scale projects. As we proceed it will definitely be useful to learn about these methods and apply them with my teammates in order to gain experience with these real world practices.

CST 361s - Week 8

This was the final week of the course and was a shorter week then normal. It has been a bit of a scramble attempting to deploy our working site, but I think we are getting close. After attempting to deploy to a few different hosts we finally settled on DigitalOcean and are waiting to hear back from CalGE in order to get the go ahead with launching the site. We are turning in all of our papers we can today, the others we have to wait to hear back from CalGE before submitting and then soon will be deploying the site. I am excited at what we were able to accomplish in less than a four week period, all things considered, and the site itself works well locally.

This week my total service is at 43 hours.

CST 361s - Week 7

This week has been a little interesting. I was having some issues with the CalGE site that I worked on with the clock in and out system not functioning properly. This I believe I finally got working today, but I have been working on it for the better part of a week thus far and lost out on some progress because of it. Now that it is complete I will hopefully figure out how and where to host the site by thursday and will finish all of my submissions by Friday, it will be tight but if I can get the site to work and be hosted properly then I think that will free up some time to work on the other projects. My team and I have been working hard this past week and I believe are caught up on most paperwork with this short weeks requirements being all that’s left, but we will need to get our final hours and reviews done by our Partner very soon.

This week I have completed 36 hours to date.

CST 361s - Week 6

This week I made a working example of the site project we are working on. I have a working log-in and sign-up form along with a working profile page where each user can add the specific information expected by our site lead. I have started working on a viewing page for the timecard punches as well and hopefully that will be working soon so I can begin work on a way to fill out a  card with the current time. I have continued with the weekly assignments including the interesting documentary provided on the new learning style being attempted. We also worked on our post-service reflection and compared how we felt now with where our opinions and beliefs were prior to beginning service. I’m hoping to finish up the site soon, figure out a proper hosting site, and then work on documentation and hand over the completed project to our contact at CalGE.

This week I have completed 16 hours and 15 minutes of my Service Learning Project.

CST 361s - Week 5

This week has been a little busy personally as I am in the middle of my move right now and have been on the road the past few days. I have been keeping in contact with my teammates as we have started working on our service project together. One of us is in the area of our Service Learning Partner and will be taking pictures and walking around the community for the Community Scan and we will work together on the final submission. I have been learning Django for the project page and find it quite interesting and fun. I’m hoping to finish my tutorial series and test projects within the next week or so and begin work on the final product website.

The Black Girls Code program seems like an interesting way to introduce an underrepresented demographic to the field of Computer Science. It often seems that the barrier to computer science comes from a mythologizing of the abilities necessary to be successful or even competent in the field. By introducing kids to the field early on, and equipping them with useful and applicable skills, the myth that only “geniuses” can study computer science will be shattered and historically underrepresented groups will join in greater numbers.

I have completed 10 hours of service on my project to date.