About the process

Hi again everyone, hope you are doing just great there!

I am now going to tell you about our application development process and how it all has succeeded. Shortly put, our target was to design an teaching application for high-school students in co-operation with them and their teachers. During this process I found some new skills and talents not just from me, but as well from my teammembers. Besides this, I discovered also some features from myself that needs some practise in the future.

In the very beginning, inventing the idea of the application was a bit challenging, but after our group got the project started it was more easy to go on with the development work. I was working mostly on the planning, scheduling and marketing field during the process, which I find maybe most familiar subjects to me. The rest of the group was putting more energy to the technical and the raw coding work. What was (still, nowadays...) unexpected during the process was the fact, that agreeing and dealing with the deadlines in real world means a lot of work and needs lots of effort and commitment to the team from everyone. Scheduling and managing with time asked a lot of ability to prioritize and organize.

In my opinion, you can never can pay attention too much to the good service quality and the communication skills in all aspects of life, and this has to be mentioned here in software development, too. It was nice to find out during the process that our team had really problem solving way to co-operate with the customer with the touch of good marketing skills as well.

From this experience I learned a lot of useful skills for the future. One is leadership, how to lead team at some points. The other thing I learned was about the planning work and paying attention to the real needs of the customer and how to respond them in a correct way. Of course I learned some skills of coding too. Lastly, I have to admit I learned a bit to tolerate ambivalence and being calm with the upcoming deadlines. 

The thing I am most proud of in this project is that our team managed to co-operate well and

achieved the targets in time in the end. I have to mention the fact that we didn't know each other in the beginning of the work at all.

So here were some of my thoughts about our software development work, hope you had a nice time reading it!

Technical topic

Nice to see you and welcome again reading my blog!

It’s about a time to tell you something about program development and some details of it. I have to admit that I’m a real beginner in the field of Computer Science so I find this task a bit challenging, but I promise you I’ll try my best. On this on going course of English we are planning an application, and now it’s time that I reveal some things about the process to you, too.

Firstly, the software development work has many steps. When developing an application, it’s really crucial to concern many points that might come up in the using stage of it. It may depend on the software that is being under process if some issues are more significant than the others, like in some cases the security of the app is more relevant than the overall design and so on.  

However, the whole app development work starts from careful planning work. It’s obvious (but still somehow really facile to forget or neglect) that already in the very early stage of the application production the likely features of the end users should be regarded as the decisive part to pay attention to. And besides planning, the testing of the software during the process is important, too.

In our app development, our group is the real first one to test the application prototype. But to get realistic picture of the reliability and the functionality of the software, it is of course critical to get feedback and real life experience of using from its end users. So in the early stage of software development, that is usually right after the team has managed to program the very first options and contents, they should be happy to give it to customer for overall look and ask the question “Is this what you were looking for?” 

Development and testing should be open to plenty of feedback and the team should actively ask for it from the customer afterwards and be open to new ideas, too. Then the team can go back then to enhance and update it, but at least some times before the shipping of the ready software give the customer opportunity to try the application in real life. In the testing stages it’s important that the application and it’s functionality faces different kind of challenges. Because of that the tester should be encouraged to try the software it in multiply places and situations. And what makes the testing even more productive, it’s to try to get the tester group consist of different kind of people with different kind of interests and habits.

That was pretty much what I had on my mind for now, have a nice weekend everyone and don’t hesitate to leave a comment :)

A succesful project

Hello everyone again! This week I’m about to tell you about a succesful project that I have been in and that I am especially proud of.

There are a few projects that I have participated, but I’d like to present you one of my own projects that I managed to end quite successfully roughly one year ago. So what it was? It was studying Chemistry, in the extend of high school, on my own. 

So what did drove me to that? While I was working, I started to look for some new challenges which could benefit me somehow later in life, too. I hadn’t study Chemistry for more than one compulsory course at high school although I found it interesting. Some years later that started bothering me when I began to think about applying for some studies. So after some thinking I decided to study Chemistry from the books and Chem-teaching websites on my own. My goal was to become so good in Chemistry after studying that I could rely on my skills in entrance examination in natural sciences at the University.

There did come up challenges almost in the very beginning of the project. It was surprisingly difficult to start studying almost without any previous knowledge about the subject or the Chemistry vocabulary. And after some years of working, the mood for studying needed to be found somewhere, too.  Furthermore, it was hard to study in the evening after a full workday. According to all these reasons, I scheduled my studies for a long time period and started bit by bit. Looking back and testing my knowledge after every few weeks was really useful, too. 

It took approximately one year to start fully understand the principles of Chemistry, and after two years of practicing I started to be confident enough to apply for studies that included chemistry. And last year I did succeed in the studies of Chemistry at University, so in my opinion I can honestly say that the project ended up successfully. 

The outcome of the project was besides learning Chemistry, I learned a lot about myself. Although studying asked me for some perseverance, I learned lots about scheduling, prioritizing and target-setting during the process.

So there it was in a nutshell, there you go! Commenting is recommendable 😊

About me

Hello everyone!

My name is Pauliina and you are now reading my brand new blog. Writing this blog is one way for me to practice my English skills and especially on later posts to get familiar with the professional vocabulary in Information Processing, so I'd be delighted to get some comments on that part as well. So, let me introduce myself in the following.

I am a first year student in Information Processing at University of Oulu. Last year I studied Biochemistry at University and before that I worked as a teacher in kindergarten for some years.

And how did I end up studying now again and became fascinated by computer science? Well, I like challenging myself on different branches in life. Information Processing didn't actually come from middle of nowhere to my mind when I was applying to these studies on last spring. I have used many applications on tablet in the daycare with children, then become more interested in it and studied a bit coding on my own just for fun, too. As well as just learning to code and studying the alphabetes of programming, for me it was so teaching to see as a professional in education, how children's learning could be supported with technology. And I have to mention the fact that when kids learn to code by playing and using easy programs like Scratch, it's really essential for them, not just from the technical aspect but in life, too. And in addition to all this, Information Processing is fascinating, developing and modern area of work. These are some reasons that I have to give to you why I'm now studying Information Processing.

So, how do I spend my time when I am not studying? Well, I do exercise quite a lot. I like jogging, going to gym, playing tennis or badminton. But most of my free time takes floorball, which is maybe my main hobby. Besides sports, I spend lots of time with my dog, taking it out for walks and going to the forest with it. And furthermore, last summer I found for me a new hobby, too. It's geo-catching. It's a fascinating hobby, which courages people to go outdoors and teaches patience, creativity and accuracy. And among geo-catching I have found new skills from me as well. For instance, I have climbed trees, a thing which I just recently was a bit scared to do! And one other thing what is fancy in geo-catching, it's that you find new places and somehow learn to look the world around you from a bit different angle.

In the end of this first post I attach a nice photo taken from one of my geo-caching adventures in the forest.

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment.