Reflection (from Review ticket)

Throughout this project, I learned how to improve my collaboration skills with other team members, as well as work on some parts of Java I wasn’t technically proficient in. Throughout last trimester, our project, while ambitious, had been muddled by miscommunication, supply chain issues, and more, which led to a project that was under what we wanted to complete. Thus, this trimester, I vowed to try and complete the project we set out to. For the first week however, this wasn’t true. I was slacking off and not really using my weekends to my fullest. But midway through I changed that. I started setting more consistent schedules for myself (which I used to hate) and adhered to them. I made time for coding, even asking my father for advice on how he plans coding with breaks. Through this, I became much more efficient in my coding, and I even looked into sounds that could help my study, like brown noise. This project has helped me greatly in improving my time management and communication skills.

This project also helped me understand Spring. Many of the people I had worked with before often used tools like ChatGPT or the internet to understand how Spring worked. While that was fine for the time being, I knew that if I was going to be coding Spring, I had to do it myself (I really like coding by hand as opposed to ChatGPT). So I spent time dissecting each part, each decorator, each method, to see what they did, and eventually I was able to grasp how the sorting methods were used. Through this I also gained an appreciation for the framework surrounding spring, including the POM files, which are truly amazing at reducing installation times, and the JWT security and CORS. I definitely appreciated being able to set what origin our Spring application could accept.

Nevertheless, I still used ChatGPT to an extent in my project, as I have for other internships, and I found that it has been extremely useful. Throughout this project, while I seldom asked ChatGPT for code, I still used it heavily as a debugging tool, similarly to many of my peers. I found that it’s not just great for giving answer, it also is great because it points out areas that you may not have seen, and you can use your human intuition to gather what may be the issues there. I used ChatGPT to bounce off ideas, and see what I could do to solve an issue.

Throughout this project, I’ve learned many things, including the value of many tools we use, to many soft skills that I’m sure to take into our passion projects. But while still I have improved, it is imperative that I take these skills into the passion project with full force, and I don’t let them go, lest I have to deal with the consequences and time loss of having to deal with them.

Retrospective (Team)

| Pros | Cons | | —- | —- | | We got to code code code | We wish I could have done a project with purpose | | We improved on my collaboration and communication skills | We lacked issues and project tracking or accountability aside from github projects | | We was able to learn a lot about the Spring backend, something I did very seldom | I didn’t follow instructions at time and we wasted time with a project that didn’t t meet requirements. | | We finished our original work rather quickly | We didn’t have great planning |
| XXXX | We didn’t go as in depth as we could have |

Team Retrospective

From a team perspective, this didn’t feel like the best project. Listed below are each of our team member’s individual reflection and retrospectives. Included what was wrong is what they coudl have done better, and what our team members could have done better

Peer Feedback (about myself)

Paaras’ Take: One thing Varaprasad could’ve done better is explanation of technicals. During the project, I asked him about some concepts and some tasks that he wanted me to complete, and the way he explained them included jargon, overcomplication, and vague details. Another thing he could’ve done better was communicate to a greater extent over the times he was not at school. I completely understand that being sick is something inevitable, but we are in a computer science class, meaning that we are able to communicate over Slack and other means. Being ill shouldn’t bar communication. Although there were definitely some improvement points, he did all of his work with high quality, ran the team even when leadership wasn’t always his job, and was overall a great team member to work with.

Tanay’s Take: I think Varalu could’ve benefitted from some better communication within the team. He clearly had very strong ideas, but he sometimes didn’t articulate them well to the rest of his team, leaving us to fill in the blanks. He is not kinda cute tho ngl

My Final Retro-Retro-Retro

Taking in everybody’s reflections upon my skill and what I can work on, I see that communication is not my strongest suit. I think communication also comes from my issues with time management, something I have taken strides to improve constantly over my time in CSA. I have a bunch of lists preloaded on my computer to go off for reminders, and I have been taking my time scheduling out my day, including physical health, homework, and most importantly code blocks. I have been talking to my dad, a manager himself, how he blocks out time and been taking advice from him to do stuff. Improving on these two skills is great headway, but I must make sure that I keep this into the rest of my projects.

Stuff With Projects We Wanted To Do

Something we wanted to do with the project but couldn’t end up doing with the project was some of the Fibonacci. Rushing, we couldn’t fix up a lot of the Fibonacci HTML styling that maxes it slightly less than aesthetically pleasing. Thus, we wish we could have done more with that.