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Personal development plans
These are my personal development goals:
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Be a better team player. Almost all teams have members with different skill sets and ambitions—that's especially true for large group projects like the Design Project course. The way I've dealt with this in the past has often been to do a (much) larger share of the work myself. That's an unfortunate habit since other team members have fewer learning opportunities because of it, lopsizing the group's dynamic. Doing all that extra work also makes it hard for me to maintain a healthy work/life balance. I want to try my best to shake this habit and re-focus some of my energy into helping other team members grow.
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Speak up more often. Public speaking may be an invaluable skill but it's way out of my comfort zone. I'd like to use the opportunity afforded to me by the Design Project course to become more confident and persuasive during presentations and review sessions. I also want to try and work on clearly and appropriately expressing my thoughts and concerns during team meetings without dominating the group in the process.
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TypeScript skills. Throughout the Bachelor Project during the third year of studying computer science, I spent the entire semester exclusively implementing backend functionality and writing tests for said functionality – all written in Java. I never wrote a single line of frontend code: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and while the latter two were already familiar to me from previous courses, I had very little prior experience with JavaScript, and still do to this day. As the UnSHACLed project is to be written almost entirely as a frontend app with only very little server-side functionality, this counts as an ideal opportunity to learn how to work with a language like JavaScript (or its typified extension, TypeScript). As a quality assurance expert, one of my responsibilities is to review pull requests before they can be merged into the main repository, which means I will require at least a good understanding of what constitutes well-written TypeScript code. Therefore, attaining these skills becomes even more important to the overall quality of the project. In order to learn this skill, I might sometimes seek aid from more experienced developers in our team, but mostly I intend to learn through trial and error.
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Quality Assurance and Control. While I already have some valuable experience with maintenance and review of documentation, with respect to some of the other aspects of the role of quality assurance expert, I still have a lot to learn. Reviews of implementations and test code aside (which are covered in the previous paragraph), I wish to learn how to aid in the preparations of reviews and meetings (or at least in the review of these preparations). Also, while of course everyone is responsible for delivering adequate work for whichever aspect of the project they are working on, I would like to become more circumspect as to the state of the entire project, instead of leaving everyone to their own devices and then realizing, at the last moment, that certain parts are not entirely up to scratch. In order to be more successful at this, I will confer with the other QA expert on our team in order to coordinate our work as much as possible, and also try to communicate often with the project manager and product owner, who will typically have good overall views of the state of the project. Lastly, when reviewing something I will communicate with those people responsible for that particular part of the project, so as to give more useful feedback.
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Web development, specifically TypeScript and React. I have some web development experience from previous courses, but I still feel that I have a lot of ground to improve on. That is the reason why I will be mainly focusing on the front end of our application. At the end I want to feel more comfortable as a front end developer. One of the things I want to improve on, is my knowledge of the TypeScript language. The language helps with the scaling of large projects by e.g. type checking. This makes expertise in the language a nice skill to have for web developers. Another point I want to focus on is the React open library. React is the most popular open source JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It has a great deal of features, and developers seem to like using it for their projects.
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Be more active in meetings and reviews. I tend to be more of a passive type in meetings. Most of the time I only listen, and I do not really participate in the discussions. That is why I have chosen for the role of secretary for the second part of the project, so that I can work on these skills. At the end I would like to be more confident in meetings, and take more initiative. This means that I will try to steer meetings and reviews in the right direction and prepare them beforehand. I plan to take notes during meetings while keeping track of the time so all important affairs can be addressed among other things.
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Agile software development. I sometimes have the tendency to procrastinate on deadlines. I believe that by following the agile development principles, I will be able to overcome this and also benefit from it for future projects and work.
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TypeScript. In the past I have always shied away from JavaScript languages and front end development in general. This project is a good opportunity for me to get more experience in this domain since our project will be a client side web app written in TypeScript.
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User friendly development skills When coding an user interface I always tried to make it easy to use without really paying special attention to it. Now, since we are developing an IDE and one of our most important quality attributes is usability this becomes even more important. For the first sprints we already decided that I am a part of the frontend team creating the user interface. I would say I now have a basic level for this skill and at the end of this course I would like to be confident to say that I can code a user friendly user interface. During the creation of the prototype we plan to ask feedback to the future users of the product (our challengers) and this way I hope to learn what aspects are important for these end user. Ideally I can extract the do’s and don’ts for creating interfaces using this feedback.
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Quality control skill I have very little experience with this skill and role. Since I already know how to write quality code and documentation (and monitor that the rest of the team does this as well), I never had to make decisions like: “Is this product ready for delivery?” or “Is this product of the expected quality?”. Since these last decisions seem crucial to me for realizing a good prototype (or even a complete product) I hope I learn making these decisions by trying it. Since every sprint we need to deliver a working product. At the end of this course I want to be able to make such decisions without doubt.
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Communication skills A skill I want to improve on is communication. My current level of this skill is decent but there is definitely room for improvement. For me, improving the communication skills conclude several aspects. One being good communication within the project team, as well as with the customer. Another aspect is the improvement of my current level of the English language. At the end of the course, I should be able to both communicate better and more frequently as well as obtain an increased level in English.
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Planning skills At the moment my planning skills are not that good. I have the tendency to frequently postpone tasks until their deadline is near. Obviously this skill should be improved, not only for this project but for many other aspects as well. During the project, I will try to improve on this skill by avoiding postponing given tasks and complete them as soon as possible. Hence, aiming to not only overcome this problem for myself but also to prevent others from waiting for my completion.
I am the project manager of my group. I want to use this course/semester to grow as much as possible as a project manager. Therefore the 2 skills I want to improve are both related to my function. I want to grow as a project manager by enhancing my:
- communicative skills.
- organizational skills. Below each of these are described in more detail.
As a project manager, firstly it is my task to make sure the communication between the different sub-teams of our team flows as smoothly as possible. Secondly it is also my responsibility to communicate with individual team members if there would by a problem, e.g. he/she is not doing any work, he/she is not responding to any messages, ... . My prior knowledge and experience consists of taking a few courses of the Teacher Education and Training program. The best important aspects of these courses related to my position are: motivating students, communicating clearly, communicating to reach a certain goal, giving feedback, non-verbal communication, ... . This seems like a nice, long list, but I want to stress that my experience in practice is fairly low. Therefore, this semester seems like the ideal chance for me to use all this theory and use it in practice. To make sure the communication between the different sub-teams runs smoothly, I will try to accomplish following intends:
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Communicate as fast possible when someone requests it. This requires me to continuously check communication channels (e.g. Slack, e-mail, but also real life). This is something I already do. But it also requires me to give a response as fast as possible. This is an aspect I can improve.
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Motivate team members. It is each team member’s own responsibility to deliver enough work. However I believe a good team leader should definitely try to motivate the whole team as much as possible (e.g. by praising the members that deliver good work, being enthusiastic about the project myself, ...). I should also alert a student when he/she is not delivering enough work. But I think the team consists of responsible, hard-working members so I think, hope this might not be necessary. This item as a whole is something I have studied the theory of, but have not practiced a lot.
As a project manager it is my task to make a planning and make sure everyone sticks to that planning. Currently I am pretty good at making a planning, but a problem I often encounter is trying to perform a task perfectly which causes me to not be able to stay on track of schedule. This perfectionism often only yields small benefits for the invested time. Definitely for larger projects, like this, this is a very important skill, which I can improve. I want to end this document by addressing the reader (probably my fellow team members and the teachers of this course). I am always open for feedback, even for the smallest detail. If I made a decision you think was not correct or communicated wrongly, let me know, even if it is only a small issue. This way I can improve myself as much as possible