Programming Knowledge
I think this trimester has helped me gain a lot of new knowledges of Jekyll, Github Pages, Java, JavaScript, and solidified more of my understanding of object oriented programming (which was admittedly a bit rusty).
KEY Github commits for my project were:
- Initial SMS working
- Encryption of auth token, reverse it!
- Changing from send by number to send by username
- Changing to user class
Outside of the AREEL project, Working with Jekyll and Github Pages, especially starting a new site with another theme, has allowed me to gain a better understanding of generation of static sites and allowed me to encounter A LOT of errors that I had to fix. After getting past the various missing reference errors and my new Github Pages up, I had to figure out converting notebooks into markdown, categories, why lab notebook formatting was weird and only showing week 0, getting rid of shimmer on photos, and currently the search bar. This has been exercising my web development/design, troubleshotting, and problem solving skill.
Collaboration/Agile
I think my team was decent at communication, we were able to communicate through slack and our group chat and occasional groups calls. But ultimately, I think collaboartion was our weakest point. I think it was mainly due to the fact that all the features on our project were very very individual. After splitting who was doing what feature, we didn’t really collborated on our features together up until integration at the end. And in addition to all integrating once the individual features were mostly completed, because of the isolated working on features and some difficulties when trying to collaborate with group member, it was difficult to integrate. This could be improved on by NOT assigning individual features to team members and having frequent checkpoints where we check each others code and help each other through problems.
Presentation
This trimester was my first CS class working with Mr. Mort, who has a more ideal perspective on what a good presentation is. Instead of taking forever by going line by line through all code, summarize key learning points, problems you ran into, and how you overcame them. Something that can help is writing out what you plan to talk about before you present. My presentation skills are something I’ve been working on this trimester and will continue working on in AP CSA and the rest of my career.
Future and Improvements
I learned a lot this trimester through both “good” and “bad” experiences. In the near future (trimester 2 of CSA), I hope to work on a project that requires more collaboration/integrated features and that I am more passionate about. I got a lot of inspiration from NATM through seeing other student’s projects, particularly a therapist mood identifier made by a team in CSA period 3 (refer to NATM Team Grading).