Skip to main content

Sprint 2 Retrospective (Capstone)

Although we have not been given anything to work on from AMPATH, save yesterday’s meeting, I have made the most of my time to learn as much as I could about Angular. I haven’t gotten all the way through the tutorial, but I want to emphasize learning it throughly over rushing it.

The first time I was going through the tutorial, I was well over halfway done when I realized I was missing one of the steps to get it to work. This happened early on in the tutorial as well, and I resorted to blindly copying and pasting every step again to get it to work. It turned out to be a very minor fix. I was much further in this time, and I was about to do the same thing, but I realized I would be wasting my time if I did that. If I didn’t understand the code enough to diagnose these simple fixes, I am not getting much out of the tutorial doing it this way.

I was talking to members of my team about it, and we came to the conclusion that even if we individually only got through the first few sections of the tutorial, our time would be better spent if we understood what we were doing thoroughly over completing all the sections without as good of an understanding of the concepts.

Even though we have not been doing a lot of work together as a team for the clinic, it is really nice being able to bounce ideas off members of our team. It is great  to have the ability to share resources with people I am working towards the same goal.

It feels like I am living out some of the apprenticeship patterns that are laid out in the textbook for this course. I am challenging myself to learn new concepts, even without a looming test or set deadline. I have gotten better and better into the habit of carving out a small chunk of my time to learning a new concept here and there. I hope this continues as this course develops, and I hope to continue this trait for the rest of my life.

Yesterday, our group liked the idea of working on the projects described in the videos in part 2a and 2b. I liked everything that I saw, and would be more than happy to work on this. It’s not certain if we will be the ones who get to work on this, but we will coordinate that with the other groups. I am very happy to get started. This is what I’ve dreamed about doing since I decided to major in computer science. It is really exciting making that happen.

I also read a part of Edward R. Tufte’s book Visual Explanations, where he has a page giving an example of what an effectively-laid out medical chart might look like (p. 111). Although this might be the only example I could find on something for medical use, I think this book might prove to be a good resource for displaying the data. I’m sure there is a lot to be learned even from the examples that are not specific to medicine.

The most useful tutorial I have found comes from Angular itself. It is a really easy-to-follow step by step guide that holds your hand through the entire thing: https://angular.io/docs
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sprint 5 Retrospective (Capstone)

It is a shame that we are so close to the end of the semester. We were gaining so much momentum. It took us a while for us to get off the ground, but once we did, we never stopped gaining speed. I feel we will be able to keep this up through this last sprint. My hopes at the beginning of the semester for what we could accomplish were unrealistically high, but I am not disappointed with what we accomplished. We have not completed a full working component quite yet, but we are very close. I think our efforts are best spent finishing the one we are currently working on and doing it right. If we divided our efforts into starting something new, we run the risk of not fully completing anything. In the sage words of Ron Swanson, “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” If we are able to get the tabs working beautifully, I will be happy with our effort. I have felt that our group has done a phenomenal job this sprint and every sprint before with our communication. We have a few ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mark Richards on the Evolution of Software Architecture

For this week’s blog on Software Architecture, I listened to Episode 3 of the “Software Architecture Radio” Podcast, which featured Mark Richards, an independent software architect. He has 32 years in the industry, with more than twenty years as a software architect.  They mostly talked about the evolution of software architecture. Although some of the things they talked about went a little over my head, I was able to pick up on the majority of what they were talking about.  He divided up the evolution of architecture into five stages. He talked about evolution happening in vertical and horizontal slices, that is within each layer and one layer affecting those above and around it. The layers were (1) hardware, (2) software, (3) human interaction, (4) social interaction, and (5) the environment, such as the internet of things. He said one thing in particular, need, drives change the fastest. As an aside, he also said that that’s the best way of teaching something i...
1 comment
Read more

Sprint 4 Retrospective (Capstone)

This sprint, in my mind, one of the most important things that I was able to figure out was getting connected to AMPATH team through the Zeplin app. It seems that someone, perhaps accidentally, disconnected me from the group. Once reconnected, I was able to connect the rest of my group. Although it hardly was a difficult task, it is hard to overstate how important it is to be on the same page as the team you are building the product for. It could have prevented a lot of wasted time on our end, and it makes it more likely that they get the end product they want. Probably the most important thing I did in terms of learning about the tools we will be using was creating a “spike.” It is a new term I’ve learned that I will add to my lexicon, meaning to build a prototype of a product, diving deep to learn as much as you can. I touched upon it in my last apprenticeship patterns blog post, on “breakable patterns.” I failed to make a successful working prototype that did everythin...
Post a Comment
Read more