First Assignment Ended!!!

That was a tough experience. Though we devoted most of our time to the FB assignment. The outcomes are not always proportional to the effort. There must be something wrong...about the first assignment, there is a misunderstanding of the goal. It's supposed to be a test of ideas, a practice to familiarise ourselves with the process of building facebook app, and also an opportunity to back up our knowledge of web programing or designing. Without  keeping all these goals in minds, sometimes we focused too much one thing, and urged quick success too much.

In this case, our team focused too much on the technology but ignored some other aspects. At first, the idea is not so eye-catching. Campus Sale focused on second-hand market place in campus. The problem is that there are already so many other mature platforms (like ebay, amazon, singapore has hardware zone,V-R zone). Even facebook has its official app "marketplace".  After investigating the marketplace on facebook, we found the such app is not so popular in facebook(rated 3,many negative feedbacks). It can be interpreted in two ways:1 the marketplace like app cannot get popular under facebook  2 we got a chance to defeat the poor "marketplace" app. Though the second assumption seems impossible, anyway we still take it to start our first assignment. At first I really disagreed with the idea, but I cannot come up with  any other good ideas. I am also not persuasive enough . So our team agree on the Campus Sale at last.

Actually I thought we really had a chance to make it popular though the chance is small. I read most of the feedback of the facebook marketplace, there are complains about the UI, some bugs such as the app can not remember user's loacation. I believe we can do better in terms of  user experience because we are users ourselves and know exactly the what functionality users need. But another big problem is advertising, it's too hard for us to buid our user base. We see that even the "marketplace" is granted the title of facebook official, it can hardly shake the foundation of tradtional  second-hand forum or ebay. So the problem is too big. Even we have friendly UI, and powerful functionality, we still have to advertise and wait for users to change their habbits otherwise we cannot survive.  Just now while I am writing this , I recieved a notification from the facebook marketplace, they are encouraging users to post listings to get a chance to win a "nexus one".  Ya, they are improving. So now I completely gave up..I want a nexus one!!! 

Ok, it's time to forget about it. Anyway we learned a lot of basic skills during the first assignment. Like PHP, Html, API and some Javascript. We also missed some key points while programming busily. Like how to promote and advertise our apps, how to handle user's feedbacks. Our teamwork also has some problems. The communication and coherence should be improved. The schedule is also implicit. It's a bit like water fall...that's why we submit it a bit late. Maybe it's because we are not familiar with the whole process at the beginning. Hope we can do it better next time.

Well, our app's main functions all work quite good (maybe has some minor bugs). Cheers to our first FB assignment. Visit it here pls: http://apps.facebook.com/campus_sale/

11 days left!!

The first week has become really different from the past. When others are still enjoying the good time without tutorials and labs, we are doing our first assignment. Now we only have 11 days left. It's really a big challenge. I really dun like staying up. But sometimes we have to make the choice. In this case, I give up my sleep time for the CS3216. Also I have quited some CCAs so that I'm less stressful. "Once you do something, do it well", I can't remember who said this or what the logic is. But I intuitively believe this. Now I give up the CCAs so that I can focus on something.

About my core modules, I am a bit worried. The tutorial began next week. So fast!!I wonder whether I have time to do tutorials. The module topics are very boring, but they are the base of ECE. It's everywhere in our daily life. Anyway, I will try my best to keep pace with the lectures.

Although there are so many stress. Group working is fun. There are a lot to learn. The progress is really like the blind touching an elephant. But I believed that one day, we will be able to sit on the elephant and master it. 

Another good news is that I can have a good sleep now. Cheers to the Sunday. Tomorrow will be better.

What I hope to learn in CS3216

The new semester is about to start tomorrow. It will be a busy semester. It is said that the module is really a killer module. But since I chose it, I must do it well.

One challenging thing for me is about how to manage time. I've been used to wasting time for the past three semesters.  Maybe this module gives me an opportunity to get rid of this bad habbit. As prof Ben said in the module blog, learning this module "is about learning how to take risks and work outside our comfort zones".  This sounds like a kind of sports training, athletes keep taking challenges against the limit of their physical ability to get stronger. I'm not sure how far away I can break through, but the experience is what other modules can not offer. No matter what the result will be, I will be clearer about how much latent energy I have and I will be much stronger after taking this module. 

Besides, as an EE student, I'm also willing to learn the promising WEB2.0 technology. It's both cool and practical. Though great effort must be put to master the tech, I believe that it's worth.  

At first I'm attracted to the module mainly by the cool projects made from this module, but gradually I realized that there something (besides the technology thing) more important to learn, like teamwork, learning at everytime and everywhere, and how to learn things in a very short time, etc.

To conclude, I'm expecting to learn a lot in this module. What I could do now is to try to adapt to the busy sem soon so that I can be ready to go and explore the unkonwn journey of CS3216.