Saturday, September 26, 2015

No time for rest

Yesterday is the submission of assignment 3 and it drained away 90% my "recess week". And right after this, final project proposal is due on the upcoming Monday and nothing has been finalized. Lets hope that we are able to get something done tomorrow or else it is going to be another suffering for us.

Meanwhile, I should start working on other modules. All the assignments are piling up due to CS3216. I have no time to cater to them even though I have spent about 15 hours per day working on the assignment (minus bathing and meal time).

I hope that the workload will go lighter after this upcoming week where many assignments and proposal due but from experience it is not going to work that way... T-T

Sunday, September 20, 2015

"Recess" Week !! Woohoo !!

Yay, recess week!! This is what many will shout out with a happy smiling face. To me, I realize the truth of recess week for a computing student last year, the "Recess Week" is not a week for you to rest but a week for you to catch up and finish up your work. Lets take a look at CS3216, I will need to complete my assignment 3 by Friday and final project proposal by next Monday. Together with my 4 other modules which have two project proposals by next week and the week after, assignment deadline by next week and mid term exam on next Saturday (which mean revision!!). Yup, that concludes by recess week. So, to those "Yay" on recess week, enjoy your rest but not for me T-T.

My assignment 3 is building up steadily after my failure in assignment 1. I hope that I do not fail again this time. Meanwhile, we are still trying to contact one of the external party but the opposite does not seem to be very interactive as out of so much emails I sent, only 1 reply so far and it replied with regard to the first email I sent. As of today, no replies from the person (To be anonymous, I am just going to call him/her/them "the person") anymore. I not sure if the person found a team who will take up the project or the person just lazy to reply. However, I still believe it is a good manner to reply to emails that direct to you.

Time for a busy "Recess Week"! YAY! (T-T)

Friday, September 11, 2015

Start of the another milestone

Last week marked the end of assignment 1 and 2. Meanwhile, assignment 3 is released for a week. Although the document says that we have 4 weeks to complete it (since it is until 25th September), the actual start point is after assignment 1 and 2 which is a week later. So, we are left with 3 weeks to finish it.

After a extremely painful experience in assignment 1, I have decided to set everything clearly and organised before the start of assignment. It is mainly on project admin issues. During assignment 1, due to the need of overhaul, the project admin were a big mess such as lack of check in of progress etc. This time, I have decided to bring all this up during first meeting so that we do not mess up the admin as we progress.

New idea is always the painful part. We need to come up with good idea yet feasible with given period of time. Some of the good brainstorming ideas were rejected because of the scale. In the end, we have decided to do a component of the large idea that I have in mind.

I hope that we do not suffer as much as during assignment 1 this time. Cheers!

Saturday, September 5, 2015

Nightmare #1

This week has been a nightmare for me. It is highly due to CS3216 assignment 1 where our project was given a "yellow card" by Colin as not "interesting" application.

I understand the fact that our application has a number of loop holes in term of design and user experience. However, it gives me an impression that "Cool" and "Awesome"  take up a very large part of an application. Let me explain why I think in such a way.

Firstly, given a very short time, we need to rush out a working product. My target is to create a small yet working and stable product. Therefore, our application may not have any really very "cool" features. Our application focus on add, group, collate and simple search photo. It seems very simple. Our front end is slightly lagging behind time. Hence, the feel of the application may not be that fantastic. It may not be able to deliver the intended function to the user. This is the first reason why I mean front end need to be awesome. Front end needs to be able to portray the features before the user will use it.

 Next, I scanned through applications from other group. Quite a number of their application have fantastic design, they put in lots of hard work in designing their application. However, in less than 4 days away from submission, some of the features are still not available or still buggy. To me, 4 days is too short to implement features yet ensuring the features are free of bug but the module gives me an impression that it speaks otherwise. I am not sure whether the teaching team believes that the students are capable of fixing those problems in 4 days or it is meant to have some bug given a short period to produce those applications. In return, awesomeness and coolness can "cover up" the short fall of those bugs.

I hope that for the upcoming assignments, my doubt on "unimportant" backend can be cleared as I still believe without a strong backend, frontend cannot do much as well. It is like a fancy speech without content. Let's hope... it does not prove me otherwise...