My predicament.

So... I am currently freaking out about my "mid-semester" review for my CS 460 class, much more than I was initially, after speaking with Professor Ackley after class today. I had been under the impression that he had already completed the mid semester reviews and that there was going to be additional padding of the grade after the fact... but with recent knowledge, the additional padding has already been applied to the grade... and thus, my lowest possible grade as a D+, and my highest possible grade a C+. This is really hard for me to comprehend since I usually get A's and B's, and currently have a 3.61 GPA at UNM with only my CS and Minor classes (my core classes were completed at CNM and are not included in the UNM GPA). It is even harder for me to comprehend that my projected grade is this low in a class that's grading criteria is almost entirely subjective: there was no syllabus stating how each aspect of the class would be graded besides a little fuzzy explanation on blog posts. It completely baffles me. This class, from what I can tell, is purely about experiencing a faux real world software development experience in a protected environment; anyone that has been actively attending classes and working with their group is garnering this experience, and, thus, should be passing the class with flying colors.... except, apparently not. I've attended every single lecture, I've participated in the discussion when I felt comfortable I could without getting mocked, I've attended 20+ hours of meetings with my group, and have worked more than that on the our project itself. Sure I could have done better on my project pitch, I'm not very comfortable doing those kinds of things (especially knowing that there was no way in hell people would pick my project anyways, thus it's kind of hard to pep yourself up), but I did what I could given that I didn't have front teeth (I was in the process of getting implants): it's a hell of hard time trying to motivate yourself to present when you don't have front teeth. And not only that, my grade has been impacted significantly because I didn't present well, which is a purely subjective grading criteria. The only person who should receive negative marks would be someone who did not present a pitch at all. Also, the grading criteria for the mid-semester self evaluations was also non-existent and is based subjectively; There were only some fuzzy guidelines in what to do. Essentially, everyone should receive a minimal grade of a B so long as they attended and participated in the class in it's various aspects, since everything is "graded" subjectively.

I've been struggling through this semester with a 20 hour internship, and all of my classes essentially consisting of group projects: That's a lot of time having to meet after class with different groups. I've also been struggling internally because of the aspect of actually graduating and having to enter the real world; It's damned scary. I've essentially been attending school for my entire life, and now I have to ram my head against the reality of finding a job and entering the work force; It's daunting for me.

Do I think that this blog post will affect my grade? Probably not in a positive way; but I felt that I needed to get what was on my mind out there.

Note 1: I have typically been writing my previous blog posts rather curtly, since I am more of the type of person to get to the point and avoid the fluff.

Note 2: During a client meeting with Professor Ackley, the topic of what the life of our project was going to be after the class was discussed. He asked a question about who all was going to continue working on it and I mentioned that I planned on graduating: he then made a little jibe about seeing if that happened and chuckled (this was before we received our "mid-semester" reviews). Looking back on that, I am rather offended that he would make light of something like that (since he likely knew my projected grade at the time).

Besides meeting about and working on the schedule generator this last week, we have been focusing on planning out our pitch so that it is a little more cohesive; our first pitch was received rather well, but I feel that we didn't get much feedback because of having presented in the middle of the three presenting that day. I know that we will be presenting in the same order, but I feel that what we have developed and implemented since the first pitch will really have our pitch stick in the minds of the audience (class).

The schedule generator is looking really good. We've got it implemented and have it generating schedules that we can now show on the schedule generating page. There are a few optimizations we could implement on it, such as organizing the class section lists from smallest to largest and then running the algorithm, but that is something that can be dealt with later. I really think that the class is going to be blown away by this feature.

After our last meeting we have divvied up the rest of the work load for this semester. There can only be one person working on coding up the schedule generator algorithm (outside of pair programming), and, thus, we have come up with other minor stories for bug fixes and minor tweaks for those of us that are not working on implementing the schedule generator.

We recently got together and discussed the algorithm we are going to use for the schedule generator. We've come up with a way so that it performs better than brute force, but still gives us all of the permutations of the schedule that we want. It will take in a list of classes, the algorithm will then create a list for each class of each of the class's sections. We will then step through the list of lists and compare each section to the other class's sections. On the comparison of the first two section lists, if the sections fit, another list of the possible schedule will be created. We then use the new schedule lists to compare with the other classes. The growth of the # of lists is the number of current schedule lists * the number of classes in the next section list. If there is a class that does not have a section that fits with any of the possible schedule lists, the algorithm will short circuit and declare that there are no possible schedules with the selected set of classes.

Our client meeting with Dave this past week was very helpful. His urgency on us implementing our final feature (the schedule generator) put our time frame in perspective. However, I feel that we should be able to implement the feature in time for the next demo.

We recently had our meeting for filling out the business model form to help solidify what information we are going to present for the pitch. It is really amazing at how something with so little can eek out so much thought of what would actually have to be done to create a fleshed out business model. We, of course, did not fill out everything since we only have 4-5 minutes to actually present the information during the pitch. It was interesting that there was a lot of overlap in the topics within each box. As we were filling out the information, we would get to another whole box that would be there to flesh out a single aspect of a previous box.

VisualScheduler is looking good. The static pages are done, the backend is essentially complete, and the Scheduling page is making wonderful progress for the the pitch demo.

Finally finished the html frontpage for the web app. It looks pretty bare at the moment, but it's at least ready to be polished to everyone's liking. Time to start on the about, help, and contact pages.

Hell f*****g yeah! Intellij fixed my project problems (though it took me a few hours to figure out how to set everything up). I can finally code without having to deal with janky hacks around the problems (still don't know why they even existed) and can now jump on making our html pages with piece of mind.