UCOSP: 2009 fall term final thoughts
Thursday, December 10, 2009
It was a valuable experience to work on the Ingres Geospatial project along with the community. The most valuable ones are not those that I got from the coding, but the co-operation, management, and more importantly, my weakness.
This project is challenging to me since I am the only University of Toronto student working with Ingres and one of the very few UCOSP students who have been grouped with a partner who is not under the same university. In order to co-operate well, I need to know more about the expectation from students at that university from which my partner is in, need to understand more about their work load level, schedules of the semester, etc, which is totally different from the group projects/assignments that I have ever done.
Although it was upsetting when I have not heard anything from my assigned partner until the end of term, because of that I caught the valuable chance to co-operate with other Ingres students as well as the community, and made myself comfortable with the style of the day to day working experience at Ingres.
I would give myself a grade 80 out of 100, with the reasons as follows.
Things that went went well
- Get myself to be familiar by the Ingres community at IRC, which always guide me back to the right track when I went side ways.
- Let the Ingres community see the scope of work that Andrew has assigned each of us to when the grading scheme is finalized such that the community has a better picture about the UCOSP students.
- Attended most of the meetings and updated Andrew and/or my mentors whenever there's news from me.
- Helped out with the other UCOSP students who are also under Ingres the best that I can, either on IRC or skype.
- Kept track of and jotted down the solution to the roadblocks that I encounter during the installation and configurations stage, also some cheat sheets for newbies like me to refer to understand the bigger picture more.
- Organized meetings with UCOSP students at their needs to update each other when normal meetings are cancelled.
- Updated several wiki pages which had parts that are irrelevant/outdated as I digged deeper about Geospatial.
Things that could have done better
- Should have contacted Andrew discussing about the organization of the course back in the summer.
- Although I have mentioned to the Ingres community, but I should have raised the concern about non-responsive partner to the school earlier.
- Should have better time mangagement, especially at peaks of assignments/midterms/exams.
After this term, I am more assure of my interest about project management and software architectural design, as well as about my abilities and weakness.
Posted byA nerdy girl at 7:29 PM
Labels: Eva Wong