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.