Part 1: Review and Reflect Learning Strategy

The 3 skills I think I employ the best are thinking, finding appropriate study locations and effectively using my time. I struggle with scheduling, reading and reciting. I struggle in these areas because, my life forces me to constantly feel rushed. I am ambitious and I want to do everything all the time. I want to work full time, go to the gym 3 nights a week, have date night with my girlfriend and take on a full class load.

It is a lot no doubt about it and I still think I will succeed as I have in the past. However, asking to spend 30 minutes reading a google doc about "study habits" is a hard ask when I have much more relevant things to tackle in my life.

In my experience, faculty see students that are not succeeding fail because they are not studying. Therefor, they do not know how to study and the faculty should instruct the students how to study.

But, I think that logic has holes. I think it is obvious that if you put in a large amount of hours into studying you will obviously succeed. The challenge is balancing that studying time with the rest that life has to offer.

Regurgitating studying tips that worked for you is a waste of time. The student will not learn a new tip that will help them. It is up to them to figure out how to manage their time and put their education first.

Part 2: Preview Time Management Skills

Part 3: Project Management Basics

This one is rather interesting. Project Managers and Engineers I find to have different definitions of "project". I think it is because, from an engineer's point of view, the project is a thing, where a project manager sees "the thing" has just another piece or task for the overall project ( a plan to achieve a certain goal ). The project manager tends to see the plan as the foundational thing that achieves the goal. However, if the goal is simply to create a thing, the plan is really a subtask of the epic to achieve the goal.

I am not feeling well today, so this journal is going to be a little salty but, I do think businesses will impart a significant level of importance to the JIRA board. And while, yes, the JIRA board is very nice to have and is an extremely useful tool, it clouds sight to the final goal. Almost anyone has the skillset to create a pretty JIRA board but, if you cannot fathom the steps it takes to achieve the goal it becomes worthless pretty quickly.

Recently, I had a manager spend weeks creating a JIRA board with epics and stories and subtasks but, he had a very old idea of building a web application that did not align well with the actual goals. Most of the tasks involved setting up APACHE servers, port forwarding, gateways and a lot of other networking that is already handled by our cloud provider which that app will live on. These tasks only served as a distraction as the team closed them out and created the actual tasks that are required to build the application.

- pages

- components

- API calls

- standing up production, staging and local environments

- testing

- logging

none of which was on the JIRA board.

Part 4: Check Out Previous Capstones

Ottersoft - Resume Parser

- PDF parsing is exceedingly difficult, very cool that they trained their own ML model with their own annotations to make the process more accurate

- My own experience with pdfs make me extremely skeptical of the accuracy of this project but, I still think it's cool.

- Very ambitions, I would like to pick an easier project myself

InfinityAreas - InfinityEngine

- A map area is super cool but, extremely ambitious I feel like it would require a lot of domain knowledge to implement at all

- this thing is freaking insane

Drive Diary - Web App

- This is a much simpler CRUD based web app that I could see myself making

Part 5: Summarize Your Week on Your Learning Journal

This week was a bit of a rollercoaster. I helped my girlfriend move from San Diego to Los Angeles on Wednesday. The same day I had a recruiter call from Coinbase. Fast forward to Friday, I had to complete a coding challenge before taking the train for the first time to LA to visit my girlfriend.

Between that and work it was difficult to find time to complete the writing assignments. But, I got it done.

Did I learn a lot?

Honestly, the biggest thing I learned is that I become very agitated when I am tired. Doing tedious work when I am very busy erodes my patience very quickly. I hope next week will be smoother.