CST 499 Week 8

My initial, immediate thought when writing this is, "How the hell did time go so quickly?" It legitimately feels like just a few months ago, I was spam emailing Kayla questions about the program (thank you again for your patience). Granted though, I did double up for most of the program and was able to complete it early, but I'm still boggled by the experience. 

Getting to the main focus of this journal entry now: I'm immensely proud of what I was able to accomplish in the past 20 months. Not only was I able to do well on every course, but most importantly I developed a strong technical and professional foundation that I can continue to build upon during the next stage of my career. Thanks to my efforts and great recommendations by three professors in our program, I was recently accepted to Georgia Tech's MSCS program, and I will officially begin graduate school in January 2026. I know that the fundamentals acquired in the CSUMB CS Online program will serve me well, and I am looking forward to continue training hard and reaching new heights. 

Once again, thank you for the experience and I wish for nothing short of good health and happiness to all. 

CST 499 Week 7

What project milestones did you accomplish this week?

• I officially wrapped up the capstone portal with our needed revisions (there were some areas for improvement on the excel file related functions across our portal, as well as implementing tooltips on app buttons for extra clarity). 
• I successfully finalized the GitHub repository to be client-ready, which means it also includes developer onboarding documentation for future volunteers.   
• I also created the project presentation video for our festival, which was difficult (squeezing my giant project into a ~3 min demo was something else) but ultimately fun to complete. This involved creating a cloned and randomized dummy database (for demoing) which was yet another cool skill among many picked up this summer. 
• Finally, I took care of the rest of our course assignments, such as completing the ILP website, zipping all my project files and submitting them, and of course submitting the draft presentation video. I am officially ready for the festival.  

What is your plan for next week?

• This coming week I intend to reach back out to my client and ask if any more issues were found or if any last minute revisions need to be made. Technically we already thoroughly tested the project and found it to work well, but it's also good practice to constantly stay in communication because bugs are almost always present in some form when it comes to software. 
• Since I am going to technically keep volunteering with NTS, we are going to plan future features on our portal as well, such as the upcoming student attendance application and then most likely some type of student grading application. 

What challenges, if any, are you currently facing in project development? Do you need instructor assistance?

• No real challenges. I will be certain to reach out in case I happen to need help, thanks!

 

CST 499 Week 6

This week I made decent progress on my capstone project, which as a reminder is a solo project to build a staff portal for Nyamboyo Technical School (NTS). Technically, the planned features are already complete and I've been working on bonus features since then.

What project milestones did you accomplish this week?

• I finalized the mobile responsiveness update for the student manager app, which allows users to use the application from a mobile device. 
• I also standardized the application actions (the buttons that are above each table on the applications). This is very important to ensure a scalable portal and simplicity for users. We decided to go with 'download template' for blank excel files, 'download data' for downloading data from the frontend table, and 'download report' for a more comprehensive excel file including all relevant columns from the application (best for organization scaling purposes). 
• I also administered our client testing; the testing went overall well, although we did find areas for improvement (this will be detailed in the testing report).  

What is your plan for next week?

• This coming week I intend to implement the final revisions to improve the portal post-testing, of which there are several. 
• We are also sharing the portal with more NTS staff to figure out how we can further improve the portal, which I look forward to. 
• After implementing revisions, I will finalize the video script, create a parallel dummy database for the video, and create visuals for the presentation. My goal is to have the video ready by the end of this weekend (August 10). 

What challenges, if any, are you currently facing in project development? Do you need instructor assistance?

• No real challenges. I will be certain to reach out in case I need help, thanks!