Week 13 - Course reflection.

Reflecting back on the whole course, I have experienced both up and down reactions to various aspects throughout. Looking back at my week 1 blog post, I had expected the course to provide a bit of a ‘simulation’ to what is would be like working at small tech company/startup in the real world. To a degree, the course delivered exactly this.  There was high points, such as finally getting a particular function to work and low points such as not being able to finish the site to the standard that I would have liked to present.

The course has provided me with plenty of experience; both practical and learning. This course allowed me to build upon my minimal JavaScript knowledge acquired from DEC01400, learn some basic PHP and to learn some core aspects of the Google Maps API, Trove API and Wikipedia API. Other than the technical side of the course, I found the course to very beneficial with learning to work with others in many different ways. Our team often seemed disjointed for some time periods and we had many different opinions on things, however we managed to pull through most of the difficult obstacles to present something reasonably close to what we envisioned.

In general, the course content was very good and Lorna and the tutors did a great job of engaging with all the teams and keeping them engaged with the content. Although the course was centred around utilising the Trove API, I feel as if the server side aspects of web design could have more ‘weighting’ in term of utilisation. For me, this was my first ever introduction to server side processes and languages, and I found that I struggled with some aspects of this. As I stand now, I would not be 100% confident in explaining exactly what all of PHP code does exactly (particularly in relation to who the process of parsing from server to client and vice versa). I think this was partly due to the time constraints that we as a group put on ourselves as well. However, in saying this, I had a similar feeling at the end of DECO1400 course with JavaScript and JQuery. But this course allowed me to realise actually how much I did know, and allowed me to find solutions to problems that I would have had know idea where to start 6 months ago. So hopefully my server side processing will improve with further courses in the future.

I found the workshops to be very beneficial to be able to get a large amount of stuff done with the help of your tutor if required. The early workshops were particular interesting during the designing aspects of the course because I have never sat down and had the time to go through Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials although I have wanted to actually learn how to use these programs to the best of my ability and not just ‘mess around’ as I had done in the past. This class gave me the time to do so!

Overall I think the course was quite well structured and covers a lot of content that will be useful in the future. Although the entire project was team based, the assessment was not and therefore provides a good balance in the event that something happens in your team.

Looking back, I believe the course has been very useful for me in advancing my web design skills and the techniques learnt will be utilised in the future. In saying this though, in the end, the major project group was a little bit of a let down.  Not individuals just the group as a whole (me included). When we first formed, I thought that we would be able work well together as I had worked with 2/5 before. This was the case in the beginning, however I think the turning point occurred when changed ideas. 

For me personally, I did not really like the idea that changed to (the one we finished with), largely due to the inaccuracies and limitations of the topic within Trove. When we formed groups we went around to different whiteboards with different ideas on them. Our group formed at the Natural Disaster Mapper idea and this is what I intended on pursuing for the semester. However, this changed and I found myself in a position where I was not fond of the concept, not because it was a terrible idea but because it would be too difficult to implement successfully due to the limitations of the Trove database which ultimately contributed to the delivery of the final product. As time went by, our team gradually became more disconnected and our communication dropped significantly. This further added ‘salt to the wound’ and made finishing the project successfully considerably harder. 

Nevertheless, although in hindsight I was not happy with the submitted result, it is important that I take away the lessons from this semester. In the real world, you are not always going to have everything go your way, you are not always going to have people contribute to a task, and you yourself are not always going to interested. But it is important to identify these problems early and get rid of them! So that the team can deliver the most successfully product as possible.

Overall, the course was good and I enjoyed the semester and course content.