A New Year Brings New Change
Working to upgrade my skills to version 2.0
Hey everyone! I hope 2020 treated you well. Though, between you and I, I’m glad 2021 is finally here.
What I’ve Been up To
To recap the winter break, I spent a lot of time refining my skills in Adobe XD and messing around with Flutter (Google’s mobile cross-platform sdk) as I am working with my capstone group to push an app to the Play Store. For the past week I’ve been firing on all four cylinders to get my courses and due dates in order as well as brushing off the cob webs off of Docker as I will need it in one of my courses this semester.
Specifically, I’ve decided to take DPS911 — Open Source Project (successor course to last year’s DPS909 — Topics in Open Source Development). One of the goals of this course is to contribute to Telescope (a blog aggregator tool to track fellow Seneca student’s involvement in open source) and a technical project of my choice. This begs the question, “what project do I want to contribute to?”
What I’m Planning
This got me thinking, I’ve always enjoyed how Seneca exposed me to different languages and specializations of software development, though I never really asked myself what I preferred working on. If I was to choose to dedicate the next 4 months to contributing to a project, I would want it to be something I was genuinely interested in. After a bit of reflection, I would say that I really enjoy designing things — specifically how users see and use things, and how I can make that experience better by altering the design. I went on to further reflect and see that I like testing software, with each iteration being better than the last. I point this out because it brings me to where I stand now, I want to start focusing more on web and mobile development, specifically cross-platform applications where my interest in user experience can really come to life. Which is why I want my technical project to be on Telescope, as it uses quite a few interesting technologies present in modern web development. This is an opportunity that I may not get for a while, which is why I am eager to start meeting with the team regularly to take the project to it’s 2.0 version.
With that being said, I plan to spend some time on the weekend checking out the numerous issues and pull requests on Telescope waiting to be reviewed. I will talk with you all again in my next blog post, for now I wish you good luck to your New Year!
