Capstone Development Blog #3
Hello and welcome to my third development blog! It has been a while since I've posted one due to being swamped with capstone work and work for other majors but I am here to talk about my experiences! Burnout: The last few weeks have been incredibly hard for me to motivate myself to pursue work on not just my capstone but all of my coding-based classes as well. This burnout often manifests itself in physical sicknesses like stomach or headaches due to long screen time exposure, Inability to properly relax our sleep as I am tracking multiple projects and personal deadlines, etc. This issue was sadly at its height when I traveled to California for GDC in March of this year. In order for me to attend the conference that the college convinced me so hard to attend I had to manage to continue to uphold a full week of schoolwork while attending and marketing myself to possible jobs, completing interviews and tech exams. This leaves me in a space where I felt no pleasure from my work and took me most of the last month to dig myself halfway out of this metaphorical pit. Thankfully with some of the progress in our capstone game in the last few weeks, I have felt so much better about our project and am way more inclined for capstone work at the moment.
Capstone Progress:
Over the last month, I have reached increasing levels of frustration with my capstone team. Large parts of these frustrations stem from two main issues, trouble understanding and incorporating proper development workflows with git and team members not adjusting or changing their individualistic or unhealthy work habits for the betterment of the team project. The second issue has been apparent for the whole project, it's something I've talked about with certain members multiple times with no changes being implemented even with involvement from our producers. This results in work often being backloaded towards the ends of sprints not giving me or others enough time to polish or fix issues that arise with this hastened implementation. The first issue annoys me personally as I was, not by my own merit just by the fact I know the most, elected as the person to teach our team how to use and understand git. Lots of our team members didn't have a basic understanding of git because they weren't taught it during their curriculum and if they were, they have not been using it as much as programmers have over the last four years. This results in a lot of git merge issues that often is left to me to understand and fix which increases in difficulty as the project and team size grows. Thankfully lots of these issues have finally reached a position of being resolved as most of the team has a strong understanding of git now and these personal development issues are being corrected by the work of all three producers and our professor together. This has greatly increased my drive for capstone work and just my general excitement for us to finally release on steam in may.