Well, after looking at that project proposal likely for the first time since I originally submitted it, it’s quite impressive how much I thought I could have gotten done, and how much I actually completed. Another interesting fact is how it simply doesn’t discuss much of the process of learning, but I guess I didn’t originally plan to shift the goal of my conclusion.
So starting out, I don’t really have many “process” documents for almost any of my work, since I am quite excellent [citation needed] at procrastination (The timestamp of this writing is somewhere around 2:30AM). For me, writing is simply something I can get done in almost entirely in one go, and it needs almost one train of thought to complete. For a document the size of the project proposal, I effectively needed to write it all in one go to make sure my points were consistent and made sense (hopefully this makes sense too).
In designing the project proposal, I wanted to put together a true plan for something I’ve been planning for months at this point, so getting it all on paper was quite simple, at least for summarizing, providing background, and giving experience, and writing deliverable information. In my work I have never really thought of “positionality”, so in writing that section, I had to learn exactly what was meant by “positionality”.
This idea was best conveyed in class through examples and some practice. In writing it in my project summary, I really thought about what I stand for and why I wanted to do the project in the first place. I guess I never really thought of by biases for creating the project and why I think I should, so this aspect really opened up another layer of my reasoning for doing this. This goes into the next thing I never really formally thought of: Audience.
When writing programs, I tend to never really think of the end user, since I really write programs for myself usually. My personal projects are exactly that, personal. This project was really my first taste at writing something for other people to use. So with this section, I could truly think to how I wanted this project to be different from the past iterations. In this section I also discussed having a possible published academic paper going over my findings on the site. At the end of the day, I came no where near close to finishing this part of it, but in writing this, I had to think outside my comfort zone. Programming is a very closed activity. I never need to really think about people seeing what I write, I just need to care about what my programs give out. A good analogy here is the whole “nobody knows how the sausage is made”, since, at the end of the day, programming ends up as a messy bodge of hundreds of internet sources that magically somehow fit together, but on the outside, users get a nice simple thing to use.
So now we get further down the inaccuracy rabbit hole, and my idealization for my project: the timeline.
I must say, I had extremely high hopes for this project, and I am a bit disappointed that I didn’t find the time to actually complete or write much code. I think the timeline really shows what I learned. I’m used to writing programs “quick and dirty”, where it all gets together even if it’s not very good. I had that original idea for this project until I got further in the class to how to properly research and find sources. I originally budgeted the design phase to be two weeks, this ended up being the entire semester effectively. This class has really taught me how to look at sources and where to find good sources, and in the future, I plan on adding more dedicated time to design, so the actual writing phase can be done more easily and less, well, dirty. The rest of the “phases” seemingly never came to play since, well, the first phase was never really complete. I designed this thinking I could write a program in a semester, since normally I can write a lot of code in a very short period of time, but as other things in my life have come to tell me, I simply can’t give large amounts of dedicated time to “personal” things much any more. In my personal life, this is seen to where I have no time to watch much TV and only watch one or two episodes a week, compared to a season in a day in high school.
So lastly this takes us to the list of proposed sources. Throughout the entire process of this class, the hardest part has been finding sources. When I program, I use a single source for about a minute and then never look at it again, its simply how I’ve done things and how many other people do things, but this class really made me think about sources and the process of learning from sources. These proposed sources were the first glimpse of how I plan on doing research in the future: less sources, but more detailed sources. The sources I normally look at simply give code that I barely understand, but the sources I gave here, as well as the sources on the annotated bibliography, those sources have a lot of information, but give me a deeper understanding of what I should use in my project.
So in conclusion, this project proposal is a snapshot in time, in between where I thought I could write programs from hundreds of sources quickly and messily, to the time now where I feel I need to give more time to design, and further flesh out my project ideas so I can write something Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.
I’m listening to music the entire time I’m writing this, so random quotes might just make their way into it.
