New Features

In the past few weeks, I have had a much greater desire to add new features to our application. Now that things are mostly together and I can see the product for what it is, it seems like it is hard not to see it for what else it could be. This is not to say that I am unhappy with our project I think we hit our goal and things came together better than I had expected.

At the same time, there are several things that I really want to add to our application. The rest of my team does thinks they would be great, but doesn't feel that they have time to add them. I have to say I rather agree, but it still irks me nonetheless. How does one "finish" a project?

Tedious

As we get closer to the end of the project, more and more of the features that we wish to implement require less and less interesting work and more tedious work. This is not to say that the features themselves are boring, they are certainly not, they are quite cool to have in the application. However web applications involve so many moving parts, that in order to do them securely and correctly, you have to do a lot of boiler plate.

I find myself getting excited to work on a new feature, only to quickly lose interest as I realize all of the small indirectly related sub tasks that are much less interesting.

I wonder how one learns to make these small tasks more enjoyable, or if that is even possible?

Presentation Thoughts

This week my group had to do a mock presentation of our application to the rest of the class. It was a rather strange experience, in that there was not really enough time for the four of us to each speak in a fluid manner, leaving a single speaker and three generally silent members.

It felt strange to me, to be a silent figure at the front of the class. The role seems to imply some form of direct interaction upon my part with the presentation, although really there wasn't any. There was plenty of indirect interaction, through showing the body language of approval and interest in what my team member was talking about, but that was about it.

I was not dissatisfied with my team members presentation, on the contrary, I thought that it was very well done. It only felt as though there should have been more time, or I should have not been standing there. This isn't really a critique against the professor, because I am well aware that this situation occurs all the time. I just wish there was a more organic way to deal with this type of presentation.

Small Changes

Currently I am working on adding some new features to Mechanapp to allow for user login and persistent user session. Both of these items are in and of themselves not very complex or difficult to implement. However, implementing them in a good, safe, reusable manner is another story entirely.

User login, demands that we are sending user credentials back and forth on the network. This means that we must now start encrypting the traffic with TLS, as well as purchase a valid TLS cert (if we want anyone to actually use this application). Further both login and persistent user session (by which I mean tying state to a user id rather than a cookie), require that we introduce a second database that will be much more mutable than our previous one. Until now our architecture had remained pretty simple, but at this point it is getting more complex.

It is strange how such small features can have such a large ripple effect in the application.

Formal Attire

Tomorrow we have our first demo presentation of our software. There has always been an age old question about these types of events, what should one wear? I know this sounds silly, but hear me out. Often at the large CS conferences, the main speakers will wear t-shirts and jeans, the formal attire of the programmer. Is this the way to go? Or are these people just being lazy? I often think that people who wore a suite to such events would either have to be James Bond cool or they would not be taken seriously. In our final meeting we will be presenting to business people, which lends itself to a more classically formal attire, but what do you wear for other CS people in a formal engagement?

Meetings

Over this semester I have had a very interesting experience with meetings in my group. Generally our group has met at least once a week often more than that, and observing these meetings has been strange. Often it seems that we are get very little done during the course of the meeting. We discuss some high level topics and that is about it. It seems that most of the real discussion actually takes place in email chains and the like. This is not to say that the meetings are bad, on the contrary they are perhaps the some of the most enjoyable times during my week. It seems that our group has the fortunate (or unfortunate) issue of getting along too well. We get along so well during our meetings that is is hard to keep them from becoming just hang out sessions.

Reflecting upon this, I am not actually sure it is a bad thing. Certainly we have somewhat of a hard time accomplishing the tasks we wish to accomplish during the meeting, but they do get done shortly thereafter in emails and other forms of communications. Also I feel like the group bonding time is really good for our cohesiveness as a team.

Running out of Time

So at this point we are pretty late in the game. There are only about 6 weeks left in this semester, and that is really not a lot of time. This puts us in a awkward position with our project, and by us, I mean me. There are several large new features that I would like to implement before the semester is done, but I don't know if we will have time to get them in place. I really feel that they are killer features, but with so little time, I feel that I don't want to lobby for help from other team members until I am at least sure I can get them off the ground.

This puts me in a very sticky situation. Work on new features that may never see the light of day, or focus on polish of the existing codebase?