CST 499 - Week 16

I loved being able to look at the journal entries over the last two years. Some interesting things I noticed:

• I set a goal and guessed that I would score 80-90% on the ETS exam and I achieved that ✔
• My capstone project idea was mostly the same from the very first class, so it was really cool to see it come to fruition. One post had an idea for and additional feature for the app -- in the future I think I would like to try to implement it.
• Some of my weaknesses are still my weakness -- computer architecture and database design. This is something I can definitely work on in the future to grow further as a computer scientist, especially with regards to database design. I would love to go into game or app development, both of which require a lot of database management.
• Seeing the posts about algorithms and logic made me especially nostalgic. I love the beauty of a good pattern and seeing these posts reminded me that a project or a job doesn't need to be stereotypically "fun" for me to love it. 
• One thing that I understood conceptually, but hadn't used too much in code at the time was the idea of concurrent tasks. If anything, the capstone project showed me just how important knowing how to manage asynchronous tasks can be.
• I don't think that I took the idea of a plan or design seriously enough when going through the classes. I would say that I was definitely "anti-Plan-and-Document". When learning about the Agile methodology, I thought "this is perfect for me", because it leans itself to short bursts of focus instead of laying out an overwhelming amount of things to get done. The capstone project really showed me the value of having a well-thought-out plan, because I cannot count the amount of times I had to re-factor code for this project because I ended up needing to pull additional data from the database or had stored it in a way that didn't make sense for access later.

  Overall, I loved this program. I learned a lot and made a lot of good connections with other classmates. I grew as a developer and a student. The only thing I'm nervous about now is starting a job search. I don't think that I'm one to perform well code-wise on the spot, but I'm excellent at getting any task accomplished with access to resources. My next steps will be building my portfolio and hopefully continuing work on my capstone project and figuring out how to get my can-do attitude translated onto a resume.

CST 499 - Week 15

 This week I focused mainly on updating the home feed and improving the UI. Based on tester feedback, I updated the home page to include color-based styling and a more obvious layout for showing information. I also added a recycler view at the top to display a user's last three matches and the result to play to the competitive side of most gamers. I wouldn't say we had problems this week.. But we did have several opportunities for improvement, so there have been a lot of re-factors and re-designs based on collaboration and feedback from others. Tonight and tomorrow we will continue to fine-tune the aspects that we can and hopefully implement at least a barebones version of our last feature (displaying user statistics).

CST 499 - Week 14

 My biggest accomplishments this week were re-designing the home feed and match view pages. The overall look feels cleaner, more informative, and more efficient. I'm still working on how to design the stat page, but I'm struggling to decide on a sleek design that gives the data, but maintains a fun delivery. This week, I plan to settle on the layout and implement at least one dynamic achievement per game. For example, figuring out how to create and award (appropriately) a "Played Azul for the first time" achievement when Azul is played for the first time by any user and extending this to work for all games on their first play. My struggles this week were less challenging and more tedious. For example, while re-designing the feed layout, I decided to include user avatars as part of the display. However, I did not originally include the users in the "Feed Activity Model", so I had to re-work some code to make sure that I was able to do that. That aspect now works well for any new Feed Activity, but I haven't backfilled old activities to include photo URLs yet. A bonus while testing this though.. I accidentally discovered (and have now fixed) a bug with the login metric that was preventing the login_count from incrementing when a user logs in for the first time.

CST 499 - Week 13

 This week I was able to modify the View Events activity to view active vs past events differently (which is closer to our desired Figma design). This involved calculating the duration of an event, pulling which users and which games were played at said event, and displaying them visually with the use of small icons in both the event landing page and the event display page. Additionally, I started work on the overall styling of the app so that the navigation from activity to activity would look more cohesive. Some of the challenges I faced involved how to differentiate between active and past events without having to write a lot of repetitive code with small differences. I ended up creating elements in the resource files that had the same IDs to avoid null pointer exceptions and then just set their visibility to "gone" in the views they didn't need to be in. Maybe not the best solution overall, but it works for now. As a side note, I'm very indecisive about the look and color scheme of the app, so I've been continuously re-doing certain aspects.

Next week I plan to work further on the per user stat page that will pull all user metrics and display them for an easy visual. I also plan to adjust the look of the home feed so that it's a little less uniform.

CST 499 - Week 12

 This week was a rollercoaster of emotions for me. I was able to fine-tune the feed display and get it working to update with new activities in real-time, which was exciting. However, at some point, when messing with my gitignore file, I did something to somehow break the gradle build and was unable to get my project to even build on my machine for a couple days. On top of this, because of the holiday season and attending a work event, I had less time than usual to work on fixing it, so I was moderately stressed about the mishap. In the end, I tried multiple strategies and finally got it working, but it cost me a lot of coding time. I should have different types of feed activities working by the end of tonight and luckily, because of the holiday, I have an extra day off this week, so I'm hoping to continue implementing different achievements and achievement types this week along with fine-tuning a lot of the UI design, especially when it comes to event creation/display. 

CST 499 - Week 11

 This week I implemented achievement tracking, which involved handling achievements by type (COUNT, STREAK, ETC.) and began work on refactoring some of our code for use in a social-media-like display feed on the landing page. This involved a bit of work on my part, just because I was unsure how to go about creating the feed without constant queries. I ended up using an approach recommended by geniuses on the internet that involved converting our already existing achievements to "activities" and denoting them by time, for example, ACHIEVEMENT_EARNED and displaying all activities on the landing page. Next week, I will continue this path and convert the events and friend relationships in a similar manner, while also working to make sure the design is consistent across multiple activities.

My biggest challenge was mentioned in the previous answer.. Trying to convert our existing database for use in a feed. Luckily, because social media apps are so common, this basically just involved me looking for examples I could use as a "template" for the desired behavior and adapting it to our use.

CST 499 - Week 10

 This week, I worked on implementing the display for the event page. You can now view events on an "events home page" with small previews for active and past events and the option to view all events of your chosen type. I also started the code for tracking and earning achievements. 

My goal for this week is to implement the remaining code for achievement earning and work on the display and layout for stat tracking. This will also involve changing the way we currently view the profile pages for ourselves and our friends. 

One of our challenges this week has to do with modifying our database tables for ease of use when accessed by our program. Databases is one of my weaker topics, and while I'm comfortable using them, I feel very inadequate when trying to design them. Other than that, most of the challenges I've run into have to do with me being unfamiliar with necessary libraries or functions. Luckily, because of this, I also am learning a lot with regards to Java and Firebase.