This is the end...as we know it....

The presentations today (including ours) went really well in my opinion. However, I don't think there was any question of who the winners were going to be. MechanApp and VisualScheduler had nice presentations and a lot of potential from the very start of the practice presentations. MechanApp had a slick presentation (as usual!) and their website interface is very simple and elegant. VisualScheduler is extremely useful with a nice interface. I think their schedule generator adds a lot of value to their site (on top of the value already added by removing the horror that is scheduling on myUNM!) and, from the sound of it, they are going to turn this into an actual product, which is great. It almost (almost!) makes me wish I wasn't graduating so I could actually try it out.

All the other presentations showed a lot of improvement from the last round of practice presentations. There were almost no glitches and the presentations themselves looked quite professional. I was pretty proud of our team in particular since our initial practice presentations had been so weak (due to lack of practice for the most part). After the optional practice round with Prof. Ackley, we really buckled down and practiced the presentation 10+ times. As I mentioned in a previous post, I also went through and made some edits to the slides, changing the colors, font sizes, and adding graphics, which I think helped make the slides look more professional and less "academic." Overall, I think we improved significantly since Friday (our last practice presentation) and I am glad that we were able to revamp the slides and do a lot of practice because it made a huge difference.

So back at the beginning of the semester, this day seemed so far away. Then suddenly it was the end of April and we were scrambling to wrap up any loose ends before the final presentation. As a team, I think we delivered an application that met our goals, looked pretty polished, and had a presentation to match. I learned a lot from this project, especially since this was my first time using Ruby, Rails, Bootstrap, and Haml and I had only had some limited experience with JavaScript and CSS prior to this. I'm glad that I decided to go with a project that used technologies that I wasn't familiar with since it challenged me and really helped me improve as a software developer. And kudos to everyone on my team; it was good working with you and I learned a lot!