After all, this semester has come to its end. I just realized that I’ve only travel around campus and home and no where else for the whole semester. Playing around with CS3216 for 17 weeks is both pleasure and pain.
First, I want to recap our final project. I enjoyed working with my teammates days after days to see the improvement of our products. There’s sometimes when we cracked our head to find better solutions while kept getting feedback like ‘You should do better’, ‘It’s unusable’, etc… As a programmer/coder, it’s such a pain to redo the application process again and again to check usability issues, and I can say, it’s quite clueless for me. Polishing the interface with shiny theme is not enough. We have to try to think as a middle-age office worker who doesn’t want to try new things, and will drop any applications if it’s not granny-usable proved, or if they used to other tools. I never knew that making such an simple application could be that hard. It’s not a huge problem where you can solve by coding more. It’s the kind of problem where you have to put on tons of the common sense, to create a cutting-edge that make people remember and use the application again. It seems that ‘common sense’ of the maker and ‘common sense’ of the users have a big gap, so what we can do is to try and try again to make it better with recommendations from friends and tutors.
Second, I’d like to recap what I’ve learned from CS3216. In three words: teamwork, sales and usability. Teamwork is the focus when you deal with your own people or your own teammate. Sales is the focus when you deal with your customer or your professor. Usability is the focus when you deal with your own product. That three words is what I’ve learned through projects, lectures and repeated by many awesome people we met during the course. Before this course, it was interested in making an MMORPG textgame, and seeing a trend of demanding for facebook applications developer in freelance market. So, I enrolled in this course expecting that I can learn the technique of making facebook and large scale web applications, so that this summer I can carry out some games or take some freelance jobs. However, soon after that I realized this course is not about the techniques or programming, but it’s about soft skills, possibility, dreams, and life stories of other people. Those lessons I have learned in CS3216 is invaluable and surpass any course I’ve taken in NUS.
Finally, I think this course is the start of many things. For me, it’s the start of my summer which I’m gonna be a freelance facebook developer while continue to develop whenmeetwhere, and also starting to develop a new game. This course is the turning point, which leads my interest to social network and social network applications.