Oddly enough, I found this sprint to be a tad more challenging than both the first and second. I’d say this is primarily because we were nearing the end of our project, and the team had some difficulty accurately choosing and weighting our epics and issues. I’m unsure if the rest of the team would agree with this sentiment, but it’s certainly something I felt at the beginning of the sprint. We all eventually found worthwhile contributions to work through, but the lack of cohesion or agreement at the beginning was a little jarring.
Despite this, I’d say the team got some of the harder pieces of work done near the end of the sprint. I certainly remember the getRange file for the API being a huge hurdle to get functioning, but with Jeff and Kenny working together they made it work in the end. Personally, I felt a little stuck after implementing a few new schemas in the API, as I had elected to work on the key validation from the other groups’ projects. I thought I’d give it a shot, as encryption has always been pretty fascinating to me with all the different types of encoding techniques that exist. However, I soon found I was quite far out of my depth; I ended up staring at StackOverload and random forums trying to get the verification working for a lot of class time. There were a few times I thought I had cracked it, but unfortunately it broke the code every time I pushed it into our repository.
In the future and during my career, it’s pretty crucial I learn to reach out or actually post something on one of these forums for help. I’m sure during the process of an actual situation my seniors will be vastly more knowledgeable than me on basically everything, so this is a skill that should hopefully develop naturally. Of course it’s important not to be an incessant pest, but with my genuine willingness to improve I’m sure I’ll be fine.
Overall, I was still really satisfied with the team this sprint. I think we all found our roles and niches in the project to work on, and were more than willing to answer questions and help out whenever it was needed. I found the capstone to be a great introduction to my future career opportunities, and the familiarity I garnered over the semester should boost my competency level pretty far beyond what it would have been otherwise. I also look forward to working on a team with a dedicated scrum leader who I can look to for some direction if I feel lost.
One thing that I do think the team could have communicated better on was our presentation. I know it’s pretty separate from the actual work we were doing, but for a good amount of time I had no idea what I was supposed to be covering in the video. I defaulted to whatever the team didn’t initially choose, as I wanted them to be more interested in what they were presenting. Unfortunately, it was difficult to glean my responsibilities as some members were quick to post what they preferred, while others didn’t accurately mention their coverage. In the end I just went over the API, and I hope I didn’t overlap all too much with the others’ videos. Regardless, that’s a minor gripe, and I don’t blame anyone because it’s the end of the semester.
As for some contributions, I added these pretty minor things to the API over the sprint.
I also helped out a bit on the getRange before I started working on the backend key validation. It starts on line 56 of this link.
From the blog CS@worcester – Dummies that Code by howbrash and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.