3216

This week, we learnt about presentations and UI/UX. Prof Damith made a wonderful presentation about making good presentations which really brought out the essence of presentations and speeches. Ultimately, the end goal of a presentation is to evoke change, be it to persuade or simply to provoke. As such, we have to consider speeches as a means to an end. With such a goal in mind, it would be silly to expect a boring presentation filled with words and stats and numbers to make as big a change as a well structured, persuasive, convincing argument. We also learnt how to structure our presentation and make good slides. Tips and tricks include things like using personal anecdotes or humor to hook the audience's attention before bringing your main point across, and things like using your slides only as a assistance to the speech rather than being the focus. UI/UX SuYuen made me realise that often, the best way to do things is the simplest way. She pitched to us the benefits of us

Week 2 has ended and the progress of assignment 1 has gone incredibly well. I am amazed at the progress we managed to make just within a week of work. The entire application's architecture has been set up, with a react front end and an expressjs MYSQL backend hosted on AWS's EC2 instance. I was supposed to work on the logic for the matching algorithm for our application, so there wasn't much I needed to do. I hope I can contribute more towards the more business side of the project since everyone is competent in coding & I am a design dummy. Learning points of the week: A bunch of driven experienced coders can produce cool things really quickly. Being in CS3216 where everyone is probably better at coding than me, I should probably leverage on my experience with startups and businesses so that I can provide more value to the team since I realise business people are more scarce here

From 3216, I hope to have a passionate team to develop and deliver value to our target market. I would like to gain a holistic understanding of not just the production of this value, but also the market research (gaining insights, valuing the need, as well as coming up with a marketing offer). For the technical side, I hope to receive guidance to produce industry level code, with adequate version control as well as programmed testing. After which, I would like to see the delivery to the end to package the product nicely with nice UI/UX with follow up surveys or interviews to ensure that we have done a good job. It seems like a lot to do in just a semester, but I will work hard with my future team to achieve as much of the above as possible!

This is my first post woohoo hello 3216 friends!