Saturday, November 19, 2016

At the end of CS3216

At the end of CS3216, did I achieve what I hope to learn at the beginning of the semester? In my very first blog, I listed 4 skills that I would like to learn in CS3216, namely project management, time management, working with people, and hardcore coding.

For the first two soft skills, considering the heavy workload, we are somewhat forced to schedule our tasks well and work efficiently in order to save time for other modules and sleep (Sorry guys I know we are not supposed to take other modules or sleep during 3216 😳). As for working with people, I really enjoy working with all my 4 teams and I truly admire them. They are all very nice people with strong technical and soft skills. Just by reading their codes and watching their presentation I can make great improvement. Just some quick example, Jinghan is a godlike iOS developer, Jiang Sheng is so pro at backend and server management, 💡has great sense of art, Melvin can always spot what is wrong with an idea, Zhi An is a such a confident presenter. There are much more to list down. Among all the advantages of my friends that I observed, if I manage to master some of them myself, I guess I will be able to push myself to a new level. Another very specific lesson I learnt from my final project teammates is, in order to have buffer time to do testing / submit for review / prepare for Steps, we really need to work very very hard from the beginning. In other words, NEVER procrastinate. I guess that is part of the reason why they are so professional. Last but not least, like many of us, I enhanced my coding skills during the semester. I have learnt new skills like NodeJS, Swift and Amazon Web Server management.

Beyond what I hoped to learn, the guest lectures and TA reviews actually taught me lessons out of my expectation. For instance, now I have a clear idea on how to do a successful pitch in 2 mins which I applied in the final pitch presentation. Prof and Su Yuen's review on our app also opened my mind on how to create great user experience. Besides, I really didn't expect that I could talk that much on Steps day haha.

And what could have been done better? Well, marketing skills. Our trail on marketing FitMi at Deck turned our to be a failure. I guess it is because firstly we didn't point out what we want them to do (downloading our app and supporting us on Steps) so most of them were like "hmmm okay, so?" after listening to our pitch. And secondly we didn't approach them in the right time with good reasons (like charity). I guess people just don't want to be disturbed by marketing people when they are eating / talking to their friends. A better way might be set up a booth and selling our T-shirt 😆. Our T-shirt is really a big success (all thanks to You Jing💡).

To summarise, 3216 really opened my mind by showing me what myself and others can do and pointed out what I need to work on. Though it is now the end of the epic semester, I have a feeling that it is a start of a new journey. A final word for myself: GLHF =)

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