Personal development plans

Jonathan Van der Cruysse

These are my personal development goals:

• 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.

• 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.

Michael Weyns

• 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.

• 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.