Day 19 Capstone Day 1
06 Feb 2020Wow. Module 1 is almost over. Today we started our first capstone project to practice the knowledge we’ve built over the first module. Four weeks down. 10 to go.
Brian spent the first hour of class going over the capstone project and giving us some hints on how we might approach the project. One thing he mentioned multiple times is that design should come first. My pair partner, Suzan, and I took that piece of advice to heart.
Suzan has no programming experience, but she’s an absolute acheiver. We spent hours on design. We made a beautiful graphical representation of our project and its classes: 
We also took the time to plan every method that we will create in each class. It was helpful to look back at some of our previous code from the module to figure out what methods would go where. We were probably the last group to start coding, but once we did our thorough planning made it easy to make steady progress.
In our pair programming arrangement, I drove and Suzan navigated. It just made sense that the less experienced person should navigate. What do they say? The team is only as strong as its weakest link? It was insane to see the progress she made over just the last few days working together. It may have taken a little while to look through old projects and figure out how to do things, but at the end of the day I felt like we were on the same page with everything.
Taking the time to slow down and create a thorough design is something I’ve never done in the past. In this way, Suzan pushed me to become a better programmer than I’ve ever been. Having our visual design and all of our methods designed saved so much time and mental strain. We worked all the way until 7pm and finished all but 3 classes. I’m really grateful I landed such a great pair partner for this capstone. We’re gonna crush it tomorrow.