Weekly Journal : Getting Started

Don’t stare at a blank page for too long, be bold, and make the first incisive stroke. The rest will come naturally.  —  James Kingman

Submitting Your Work

Submit a Markdown formatted plain text file, named week04_starting.md, to the individual portfolio_NETID repository provided for you in the course's Gitlab group.

Specification

Starting a Big Project

You have likely heard the basic advice for working on big projects: break the work into smaller, more manageable chunks; focus on the next small step that will move you forward; set intermediate deadlines, etc.. However, this can be complicated when you are not sure how to do the project or you are working with other people that have different ideas about chunks or deadlines. Take some time to reflect on how the project started, what you decided to work on initially, how your initial team meetings went, and use that to help yourself imagine a manageable process for getting the project done.

Discuss the following questions to help your thinking:

• What was your initial impression of your team mates?
• How did your first team meeting go from your perspective and what positive or negative events occurred to form your opinion?
• What are ways people can be proactive in a team?
• How can the size and timing of your GIT commits help or hurt your team experience?
• What is the first design challenge you (or your team) chose to work on and why?
• What is the first piece of code you chose to work on and why?
• What is the hardest part of this project (or the biggest obstacle) from your perspective (be it technical, design, team related or something else)?
• How long did you write code for this project the first time (in one sitting) and did you accomplish what you wanted to? What helped or got in your way?
• What would the most successful outcome of this project look like for you?
• What would the worst possible outcome of this project look like for you?

Learning Reflection

Take time regularly to reflect on the development of your thoughts by describing what you have learned from specific, important, events or resources. These efforts at metacognition helps you deepen your learning by making you more aware of your own thinking and more active in your education. These can be about anything useful, interesting, unexpected, controversial, or a spectacular success or failure that occurred.

• Discuss at least two ways your perspective on the practice of coding has changed
  This helps you reflect on what are your coding habits and mindsets to better direct how they are changing as you incorporate new practices.
• Describe at least two of things you have learned from the course resources (such as readings, code examples or refactorings, etc.)
  This helps you remember the sources of and linkages between some of the non-coding, thought-work, that you do during the semester.
• Describe at least two thing you learned from interactions with any of the Teaching Team so far this semester
  This helps you process the feedback received and helps us ensure it was well communicated.

Remember when writing a personal reflection, you are offering your opinions. However you are also demonstrating that you have thought about the issue carefully and, from multiple perspectives. For example, you may want to start with something like these:

I used to believe …, however, after considering the effect of … my perception has shifted ….
Once seemed obvious that … yet now it is more tempting to ask ….
Perhaps …. is an assumption which relies too heavily on … Therefore it may be more accurate to suggest…

ChatGPT

ChatGPT can help you generate ideas, create example code, review, refactor, or even debug code. While you are not required to use it, if you do, I think it would be helpful to share our collective experiences. To that end, each week's Journal will include a place for you to share how you used ChatGPT in more detail than would typically be found when attributing it within your code or README file. I have also created an ED thread tag for ChatGPT. This exercise can also help you reflect on how to use it more deliberately and usefully.

• Describe two situations in which you sought help from ChatGPT and whether or not its responses were ultimately helpful
• Describe one situation in which you refined ChatGPT's response and what information learned in this course helped you engineer your prompts or try these examples
• Give one direct prompt you provided ChatGPT