Author: Dustin Seger
Project: Meetify
Date: 9/9/20
Purpose: Senior Capstone Class - Assignment 3
From my perspective, senior design projects are about showcasing what you're capable of due to your college education and co-op experiences. The audience of this showcase could be potential employers as well as just friends and family, serving as a concrete example of the work you can accomplish with your peers. However, this does not necessarily mean it needs to be in a 100% familiar area. For me personally, I hope to also prove my adaptability in the workplace through this project, meaning I actually prefer to work in languages and frameworks unfamiliar to me. This allows me to proactively learn about and develop on a project simultaneously. Since this is the exact process that needs to happen at the start of most jobs, it's the most important skill to convey from a senior project, in my opinion.
Although I do want to be adaptable, the fundamental concepts for beginning a project are still important to have. Thankfully, the University of Cincinnati (UC) has prepared me through its rigorous college curriculum. The CS program at UC originally gave me my first steps in the door to programming, showing me the basic fundamentals via C++. From here, the programming and practical skills around it were primarily further developed in co-ops, leaving the college courses to be more theoretical in nature. This has provided me with insights into concepts you may not see in every co-op, such as measuring code complexity (Zimmer class code), different ways to divide and organize tasks (Software engineering), methods for improving program efficiency (data structures), and much more. Of course, we've also received knowledge on networking concetps (networking) which will help when actually connecting users over the internet. On top of this, the CS program at UC has required a very consistent stream of work, greatly helping with my work ethic and project efficiency. Thanks to UC, I'm ready to put these core skills into action, primarily when formulating and organizing our project.
UC has helped a lot for my personal skills, but co-ops certainly did their part as well. I'd say most of the practical programming skills I've developed were during co-ops. My first couple software engineering co-ops with Crown Equipment had me working on web applications for the purposes of downloading files to forklifts and managing our internal databases. Since I was the primary developer for both of these programs, as well as QA tester and customer support, I was able to really overhaul my programming abilities from all sides through these co-ops, giving me the skills I need to build our project from the ground up. As my co-ops advanced, I stuck with Crown and was slowly given more responsibility and trust, eventually leading to my co-op in Germany with Crown Equipment's German subsidary: Crown Gabelstapler. Through this time of increasing trust, I've come to learn how to lead others, how to better organize my own tasks, how to speak about programs to non-CS individuals, and much more. The required increase in soft skills and emotional intelligence that was required to have large responsibilities and work in a foreign environment will certainly help me to push through tough times in the development cycle and guide my teammates as we develop this senior capstone project.
Past the skills I have is just a general excitement for the project. Having been at Crown for all 5 co-op semesters, it's easy to understand that I consistently wound up working with the same people on the same types of projects. It will be great to start this project with a new team, new functional requirements, and totally new atmosphere. On top of that, although I very much respect my prior supervisors, it will be great to have a bigger say in how things are organized and what our requirements should be. I love the thrill of making executive decisions in programming, and I can't wait to see the challenges that will come our way.
To make sure this excitement holds, we need to make the project enjoyable to develop. This, of course, starts with our preliminary approach to the project. I first hope to sit down with my teammates and discuss what we generally want out of the project. This will need to be as specific as possible, as the desires here will then help us to decide what language and framework we want to use. From there, I think the approach is to set up some sort of agile user story system and get to work, taking the remaining setbacks and requirement changes as we go. Ultimately, I expect us to do well and create a seamless, fun-to-use application for meeting friends via shared musical interests. Although I don't think a software project is ever really "done", I think we will know that its complete when all of our original goals are met. From there, it will likely be a never-ending battle of optimization and tweaking. However, we can and should certainly do real user tests which will help us gauge on how good of a job we've done, as will directly speaking with our advisor.
All in all, I can't wait to really get started on the project with Rob and Jake. I'm very confident in our abilities, and I think we're going to do a great job getting it done.
-Dustin Seger