Week 6

·       Part 1: Help Your Teammates to Develop Capstone Ideas

o   Using email or during your team meeting, briefly discuss possible capstone ideas with your teammates. Record in your learning journal what you discussed and if any ideas stood out to you. 

§  Matthew had a couple of ideas related to things that could be personally used by him like a to-do list and what could be used by others like a parser and renderer for a markup language, web plug-in for bookmarks and a framework for Scala or Rust. Matthews development testing framework project is interesting because it would be a good learning experience to see what kind of parts go into a homegrown framework. I am also interested in what Scala can do since its similar to Java, the language I learned in Programming I and II.

§  Raymond is considering projects that are centered around time management and goals. He also wanted to do an app that tracked town routes and gas prices on your route. Another possible project of his was a web extension for annotating and commenting on bookmarks then organizing those into a works cited page. Raymond's time management and goals project is interesting because many people lack these skills and have their own way to acquiring and using those skills. A lot of time management apps try to gamify the concept, like Habitica for LifeRPG where the user will get experience points, gain special ranks, and items.

·       Part 2: Keep Up With Your Learning Journal

o   Update the learning journal to include what have you learned from this week's activities. You should cover what you have learned from the career guide, and how your team has started working on the final presentation projects.

§  In the career guide, I learned a few things that I have not been exposed to at other schools I have been to. I learned a few networking tips, one good one is to introduce yourself and mention something that you both might have in common. Another thing you can do is set up an informational interview with someone in the business already. There, you ask how they got started in the field, how a typical day is, and challenges in the job. There was other excellent questions on page 14.

§  In Prof. Tao's video I learned about the top 10 things companies are looking for. They are dependableness, communication, solving problems, leadership, proactive, integrity, flexibility, confidence, learning, and tech skills. I am currently working on my confidence, learning, and tech skills by having a professional twitter account that I use to keep track of useful industry material or tools I find useful. For example, I installed a small program that allows the creation of multiple desktops on Windows 8. I tweeted that and I can easily install it again if I lose my computer. I can work on my proactiveness, problem solving, and flexibility by working on new personal projects with languages I am not familiar with. I need to work on my dependableness and leadership, but those will probably happen over time if I always try to have courage to say what's on my mind.

§  Our team met to find a final presentation topic. We each chose 3-4 topics then decided on what we could give up until there was 3 topics; one from each person.