This was a pretty short week since we were off for Labor Day Monday, and I am off on Fridays. Also my supervisor was out of town on a business trip so I was mostly left to do things on my own the whole time. Although we had less help than usual, I feel that I still made good use of the time since I was forced to do certain things on my own which speeds up the learning curve.

Tanner and I continued with our project, finishing up some of the main functionality and moving on to the database implementation. This proved a little tricky since we had to make sure our information was represented correctly by configuring the correct tables, columns and properties. The “backend” of our project is mostly finished so we can focus more on creating an good UI for our customers next week.

I had a little more downtime than usual this week so I tried to learn and research as much as I could. For example, I was listening to a talk by Robert Martin on the S.O.L.I.D. principles which really gave me a glimpse into some “higher level” concepts I had not been too familiar with. I also learned a little more about some built in PHP operations like the & symbol and regular expressions. I am starting to also learn as a programmer, that it is not always best to spend hours in a row writing code, it is highly important to take the time to understand your problem better and research ways to design your application. This also prevents burnout and allows you think about a problem from different angles.

I would give myself a 4 this week since it felt like a little less work than usual but I managed to keep our project moving forward while my supervisor was away (of course with the help of my great co-workers!). I can see our project coming together nicely and look forward to finishing it nicely!