Day 20 Capstone Day 2

07 Feb 2020

Day two of the first capstone. The day was filled with an uplifting camaraderie that doesn’t quite exist on normal class days. We were off on our own all day and different groups were experiencing different issues, pursuing different approaches, and brainstorming off each other. To be sure, there was tension in struggle but there was also laughter and a warm sense of shared attention.

Suzan and I switched pair programming roles for day two, I navigated and she drove. The first several hours went by smoothly and the thorough planning we did yesterday was paying off. By lunch we had one final class left, the main class where all of our pieces would come together. But soon it became clear that we were missing some methods in our user interaction class and it took a while to implement them. When we finally got our main class written and began functional testing, we encountered several small bugs but really nothing large and structural.

It took longer than expected to get smooth data entry and menu navigation and before we knew it was nearing 7pm. Both of us were clearly exhausted. The amount of work we smooshed into a short period of time was kind of insane. Our goal was to use up no weekend time and looking back, it might have made more sense to split the work into 3 reasonable work days instead of 2 very long, mentally straining days. It took more and more energy to make sense of what was going on in Eclipse.

We considered calling it and coming back to finish on Saturday, but we were so close! Soon, we had only to instantiate our LogWriter class to write logs in the main class. There were a few groups still working and I started crowdsourcing solutions:

“Hey, who has a tip on the date formatter?” “Hey, did anybody figure out how to format a decimal for writing to the log?” “Hey, what PrintWriter did you use to append and not overwrite?”

Everyone was insanely eager to help us with our final steps and we implemented the logger in probably 20 minutes. We ran a few more run throughs of our project and then commited. It was 8pm, but we had our weekend.

Lunch-time Panel:

Besides the capstone, there was also a panelist event at Tech Elevator during lunch. Three tech professionals who work alongside software developers shared their stories. One was a Quality Assurance tester, one was a Product Owner, and one was a Data Scientist. It was interesting and helpful to hear about the different career paths which aren’t explicitly software developer.