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.