Coming to an end

Next week is the end of the semester. From CS3216, I learnt various soft skills regarding creation of application, mainly from UI/UX and marketing.

Another skill which I do not expect to obtain in CS3216 is the real experience in dealing with a customer. In addition to that, the customer is not a tech person. The communication becomes a very tiring process especially when it comes to explanation and agreement.

In the past, I always hear rumors where in working environment, the non-tech customers/departments always think that tech team is a magic team who can create anything they want in no time. In results, they demand lots from us and take it for granted. When error or bug occurs, tech team takes the blame.

I doubted the rumors because working with the bunch of intellectual working adult (I assume), such unreasonable request will not be so rampant. However, I think I need to reconsider my stand on the rumors. There is indeed a very big communication gap between us and the other parties.

This comes down to the skill I obtain. We need to communicate in order to bring down the expectation of the opposite parties to avoid putting ourselves in worse position when we cannot deliver the intended goods in time.

Another 2 more weeks and that concludes my journey in CS3216. Alright, time to work now!!

Tired...

I am extremely tired at this point of time. Everyday wake up to implement new feature and fix bug. My daily routine without lesson will be wake up, code, eat lunch, bathe, code, eat dinner, code, bathe and go to sleep. It is extremely tired. I am also traumatized by all the problems that are yet to be solved or solved, to the point where I had nightmare for some of those problems. Can anyone imagine one woke up in the middle of the night realizing some part of the code is buggy?

I also have hard time communicating with someone. As a comp science student (A sweeping statement here), I am very focused on objective and require a very specific and clear instruction to carry out my work. As such, those issues with very vague and unclear idea cracking my brain. There are like thousand and one ways to achieve certain goal and the decision is passed to me. If the solution is not the desired way, I need to change or even overhaul! Why can't you give me a clearer idea so that I do not have to worry out it!

Tired...

First week into final project

We managed to get an external project through connection of an external pitcher. It is a travelling application where it applies UBER like idea. It is called Travez which is an application who serve travelers by helping them with their decision making and itineraries planning. The key point is to tap on local people who know a lot about attractions in their countries and get those people to serve the travelers through application.

This idea gave me a very strong impression that nowadays, more and more people have started to think of idea that make use of other to work for them. It may leads to good and bad depending on how the direction goes.

For good, more people can pick up part time job and  earn through such simple job. It provides more jobs to those who face problem such as disabilities and incapable of leaving house. It also allow student to pick up easy part time job for their pocket money.

Here comes the bad thing. First, who is going to be responsible for such jobs, the company or the person? If something goes wrong, will the company bears full responsibility? Well, the company should bear most of the responsibility. Take Uber for example, if the vehicle gets into accident (*touch wood*), will be company compensate the driver and the client? I believe Uber should have some sort of insurance to cover those accidents but how about other similar out sourced businesses?

Next, how to pay income tax? Is the company going to submit income tax for those outsourced by the company? How about the quality of the company? Is the company going to control the quality through a very strict selection?

There are quite a number of problems before you can out source a business and get other to work for you and you wait for money to come in. I do not disagree with such method. It is innovative and interesting  business model but there are more admin issue to tackle before this method works.

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

"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)

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!

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...