I am currently very happy, ecstatic even; our group provided a very fine performance of our pitch presentation after all of our practice, and the results couldn't have been better. We received the 1st Place UNM CS Software Engineering Project Showcase award, bragging rights, and a $200 dollar cash prize (extremely unexpected, but a pleasant surprise). I am glad that I was able to perform my part up to par with the others to achieve this; I feel that I have redeemed myself of my poor performance on my project pitch early in the semester. We split the cash prize in such a way that Dan was able to recoup his out of pocket costs for flyer prints and image licensing: Dan got $100, and Zach, David, and I split the remaining $100. We are all on good terms and will definitely get together after this semester to have a few drinks in celebration of this achievement in light of our hard work.

I am very relieved that this semester is over after this blog post; I have already turned in both my group member evaluation and  final self-evaluation, and all of my other classes are finished. I hope that my increased effort in these last three weeks has been noticed in regards to CS 460 to better my grade. This class has been a good insight into what it is like to be a software engineer. It has also been nice to compare my experiences within CS 460 with my experiences in my internship; there are a ton of similarities. The amount of work I have had to do this semester has blown all of my past semesters' work loads out of the atmosphere; however, even with how much work this semester has demanded, I appreciate the vast amount of experience I have accrued.

I am glad that this semester is at an end, I am glad that I will (hopefully) be graduating, and I look forward to see what life brings my way.

My group and I have worked on our showcase pitch for more than 6 hours over the weekend and today. It has improved a lot during this time, and I believe that we'll be able to perform very well for tomorrow. We are covering all of the bases; an intro into the problem, why what is currently available is bad, why our web application helps solve the problem, the technology behind our web application, how we plan to generate revenue and market our web application, and demos for both the manual scheduling, and the schedule generator. I really hope that what we have prepared will be well received by the judges. Since we've had a code freeze for the last week or so, we have been able to focus on our parts as well as being able catch up on other classes; it has been insane how much time CS 460 eats into your other classes. However, with a team like ours, we've been able to keep the stress down, get what we needed implemented, and maintain the CS 460/other classes work balance, resulting in a healthy work/work balance throughout the semester (see what I did there?). I hope that Professor Ackley sees that I'm attempting to redeem myself from my poor project pitch performance and graces me with a passing grade for the class.

It's the last week of classes and I'm feeling pretty damn good, I'm essentially done with three of my classes after tomorrow (Thursday), and I have plenty of time to focus on my remaining two classes (cs460 and cs 442).

This semester has probably been one of my most difficult, mainly because of all of the group projects/homework and having a 20 hour internship doing front end web development. I was pretty down trodden with such a low projected grade for CS460, but I'm trying to make the best of it. My group and I are planning to meet tomorrow and Saturday to polish up our pitch for this coming Tuesday. I know my project pitch at the beginning of the semester was extremely poor, due to various reasons (lack of confidence/front teeth), but I feel much more confident in being able to perform to a professional standard for our final pitch. I've also been asking other members of the class how they did their self evaluations, so I hope I'll be able to create a final self evaluation that is better than my mid-semester one.