Another one bites the dust...

I am super stoked on what groups were able to put together by the end of it all.  Typically in classes like this there is one group that stands on stage and shows off their unit tests because they have nothing.  I was pleasantly surprised that this did not happen.

One group that I believe did not get the credit that they were entitled was PowderAde.........Oh uh Carve Companion.  This app is dope!  I am going to bug Brandon until he lets me put it on my phone.  Just making an app is a super impressive feat.  I have tried my hand at it and when my Hello World app crashed for a week, I said screw it.  Their application is solid and I am really going to use it this coming snow season.  Hell even at the skate park.  They really put in a ton of work for the Google Play and Google Map integration and for that I give them props.

Well another semester is gone and I can't say I am not glad to see it go.  Last semester I told myself "next semester is going to be cake compared to 351".  Now this semester I am saying "next semester will be cake compared to 460".  **Commence infinite loop**.  This was way harder than I thought.  This was actually probably my hardest CS class.

 I am not a business man at all, I am the troll banging on the keyboard.  At least I want to be.  This class really opened my eyes that funding comes from somewhere and this is what you need to do to get it out of investors/customers pockets and into yours.  I learned that no matter what, you must sell yourself and your product.  People will not see that you wrote a project in Erlang and just throw money at you.  Ok maybe they will, but still.  Now I know what needs to be done to sell a product to someone who has never seen it.  I have also made huge progress in writing.  By doing so much writing with the pitches and the reviews and the evaluations, I am now much better at doing things that I will be doing at a company for the rest of my days.  Now I really see that changing the world through software is not just changing the world through software.  It's coming up with an idea, developing it, convincing people this is a good idea, trying again to convince people this is a good idea, coming up with a business model, theeeeeen changing the world through software.  This is quite a daunting task for most of us, but we all pulled it off.

Congrats to Mechanapp for their second place victory.  Those guys are solid talent and they earned it.  I am excited to see if they keep going with the application, or if they drop everything and enter into the job market.  Either way, they should be very proud.

Thanks to my team Dan, Zach, Kellen, and honorary member Katie.  This app would be nothing without you all.

A huge thanks goes out to Professor Ackley for kicking my ass in 251, 351, and 460.  I have gained more knowledge and lost more sleep than I knew was possible.  By being such a tough teacher, he weeds out the "tourists" as he would say, and pushes everyone else to give 150%.  After every class period, I felt like I gave 3 pints of blood, but I am a much stronger developer for it.  

We Did it

I cannot believe that our project was picked as the top software engineering project of 2014.  I feel that the whole thing came together very solidly.  I was nervous at first since our project was not evaluated on the content, but on the quality of the speech.  One thing is for sure though, I am so glad that we had two practice pitches before this one.  The biggest benefit in my mind is that it gave us a chance to really nail down our timing.  If we had gone on stage today and been four minutes short on our talk as we had previously done, we would have had no chance.  The practice talks got us very comfortable with our speeches and I was not nearly as nervous for today as I thought I would be.  We have a long way to go though.

I do believe that we can use this application to change the world through software.  In fact, with our winnings, I believe that we are going to upgrade our Amazon server and try to get this thing out by October.  I feel that by winning today, we have made a great impact on the class and now we must make an impact on the rest of campus.

A big thanks to Professor Ackley, the guest judges, and my fellow students for this class.  It has helped me grow as a Software Engineer.

Bug Whisperer

One of the biggest things that I have contributed to my team through this whole project is being able to break things.  I have been able to find many issues with our project (and I am continuing to).  This is I have managed to find bugs and unexpected behavior that my other ream members have not noticed, which we have fixed soon after.  This is helping our project be more solid and ensure that we do not have something terrible happen during our presentation.

I did have an interesting scare the other day.  Brandon Lites asked me if we are sanitizing our SQL queries and I looked at him like a deer in the headlights.  After convincing him not to do some horrible SQL injection on our project,  I brought the issue up with my team.  We did some research thinking that we would have to write some kludge in back end to make the site less vulnerable to attack.  Not so.  We are using Hibernate as our Java Persistence framework and it actually sanitizes queries for you!  Looks like Bobby Tables won't have a problem attending UNM (ha).

 On a serious note though, we learned an important lesson from this.  This class is about designing software for the real world and getting us ready to go from school to shipping code to a customer.  Now, in school we have never really had to worry about security issues like this, the goal has just been to get the project finished.  In the real world, if we had shipped a product that was vulnerable SQL injection, I am sure that it would be exploited in less than a day.  Even though Hibernate took care of the vulnerability, it was a reminder to keep security in mind and always stay sharp on how something is implemented.      

Thoughts On Continued Development

So, it has been a topic that had been brought up a lot so I figured it was worth mentioning.  A lot of people that I have talked to have expressed interest in using the VisualScheduler application and have been asking for the URL.  Most of them have also said that they would definitely pay five dollars a semester for our schedule generator.  Zach has showed the application to a UNM recruiter and they were very impressed with the application.  She gave us the name of someone named Cinnamon Blair to talk to about money and if we will be allowed to make profit off of the application.  I firmly believe that if we talk to UNM about making profit off of the application, people will use it and it will be successful.  Soon in the future, we plan to get more server space than the micro instance we have right now so we can support many more users.  One of the starting places to kick off the application will be the UNM subreddit to get the word out to other people at this University.  We will also be setting up social media pages soon to get people involved with the application.  I do not see a reason why UNM would provide something like OpenData if they did not want an application like this to be made, so I feel as though me and my team have filled a giant hole in the registration process.