Sunday, November 6, 2016

The Beginning of the End

Only 4 days left to STEPS!

So it's the end of the project and somehow (I think) we've survived 3216. I mean we don't actually know if we've passed yet.

So what do I think of final project?

1. Time constraints.

Given only 6 weeks to build this project, that's generally not very feasible. For us, making use of API and packaging it nicely... That's basically most of the work we did. In short, 6 weeks is too short to build anything significant with 4 people. Take, for example, CVWO - this year, our team did Lions Befrienders, a massive management system, that after 3 months of work we couldn't finish. And that's 8 of us working on it, 8 fantastic programmers who work together well, full time. Yep. I suppose I came into 3216 with that mentality but honestly to be fair to the module it's quite impossible to achieve such scale.

2. Ideas are key

If you don't have ideas, don't take 3216. That's basically the problem throughout the entire mod - running out of ideas as for what to do. Some ideas are absolutely lame (sorry Bubble), some aren't workable, some just don't see real world use enough.

3. Teamwork & Structure

The more fluid structure of 3216 as compared to CVWO (sorry I keep using this as a benchmark, but in any case the same would have applied to my prev internship at a startup) means that there's no clear leadership or in some sense roles. Things were terribly fluid and internal deadlines non-existent, leading to huge amounts of inefficiency. All this coupled, of course, with our other modules. Answering to Joe (CVWO team lead) or Prof Ben was much easier than trying to figure out who to do what and by when.

Of course, this is only the end of a beginning... So we'll probably see the real stuff start to pop up soon!

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