I'm surprised to have passed 2 weeks without actually giving up... although numerous times I've thought of giving up the module and my minor. Looks like I'm slightly more resilient than I thought?
Anyhow, this last week has passed in a flash. We (me, yuling, yujing, shaohua) only properly started coding quite late (shan't say when), and earlier on was mostly thinking of the app and planning features and such. And OH MAN how crazy it was. I've never written code this fast before.
Since all of us were coders, I decided to take on most of the design stuff for our group. So, CSS effects and layouts came under me, and oh my whitespace is an ART. I've never designed websites that I don't feel "urgh" at all, and frankly my design for this assignment is still giving me the chills. It may be because of Fireworks, or maybe not. In any case, I decided that my colour sense was terribly bad (even though I have done so many design things before), that we took 1/2 hour discussing which colour scheme to use, while I was reading on hues, sats and lums.
Also, this assignment gave me my first overnight coding marathon in SOC basement. For 2103 (during last year's special term), my group of 4 non-SOC students (chem eng, EEE, and two ISE) coded 10am-10pm for several days before the deadline. This time round, it was 6pm - 2/3am, then yuling & yujing went to some secret place to sleep. Shaohua went to sleep at the chair in the basement. Can't really remember what time I stopped (should be around 3), but i didn't take much sleep. Slept on 3 chairs pulled from the table behind me from 3-5am, and woke up cause I couldn't bear the aircon blasting away. So woke up, and continued to go through the code.
Saturday's workshops were not really useful for me, since my mind was on running away for my make-up lecture at 11am (they had to close down some LTs to clear up the stuff in E3A on Wednesday). As the clock ticked closer, I just couldn't sit still, and when the time came for my design project lecture, the context switch just couldn't be made. I was trying to fix my code instead of learning HYSIS ): Going back to SOC for the rest of the workshops were like a guilt trip, since I couldn't concentrate on either. Came back to the middle of some jQuery workshop, which quickly ended after I reached... So the workshops weren't very effective this week. (I like the AWS one though, but it felt rather like a speedboat ride O.o).
Anyway, though I knew yuling n yujing from our SEP in HK, this was the first time that we worked together on any project. And haha, it is awkward sometimes. Like there's something you believe strongly in, but you just can't get consensus, so where do you go from then on? It's just that, maybe I'm weird.
The project progress is another big problem right now. It seemed quite ok while in the planning stage, but now we have quite a big gap between now and achieving the basic functionality intended right at the start. Even if we cut some features, eg editing the created stuff, it might not be possible to complete in time. I mean, come on I have to be realistic. BUT yet, to me somewhere it's a challenge, we thought this was possible, and only WE can prove to ourselves that this wasn't wrong. After all, we estimated our ability at this level in the first place. Can we do it? Let's hope none of my group breaks down right now!
Jiayou to all of my group! Everyone, be strong, we can complete this! I know you all have the potential :P
And jiayou to me too (:
Two things I want to say immediately:
ReplyDeletei) I'm glad you stayed on. :) CS3216's success depends on crazy people doing crazy things, and I can see that's where your group is headed. :D
ii) I think your UI is awesome. But still keep beating yourself up over it. That's how we improve. :) that said keep an eye on the clock because of the hard deadline ahead.
Ok that's out of the way.. haha. As for the "awkward moments" that's why project leaders are important. The project leader will be the one to break a stalemate, and to do that he/she has to have a clear idea of what the group wanted in the first place, what changes your customers wanted, and then make decisions guided by that knowledge.
And yes while programming is one of the most important things in a software project - together with UI design and quality control - it is also fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.
There are many, many design steps that must be undertaken before and while coding, and that's exactly the point of courses like CS1010, CS1010E, CS1101S and CG1101 - design, design, design, and then code, and design some more. That's why that set of courses is collectively called "Programming Methodology" rather than simply "Programming". ;)