Course Review

As the subject Web Apps comes to end, it’s time to reflect on the things I’ve learned, liked and disliked. Let me start off by saying that the Web Apps was by far my favourite subject this semester. While some were quite interesting (Behaviour in Organisations), the main thing to do is memorize the textbook and reproduce the professor’s opinion in numerous essays. Web Apps started off slow but got more and more intense during the semester. The first assignment was both a lot of fun and very challenging. I can proudly say that I finally got CSS. Especially the fact that you can realize most of the layouts you create in Photoshop or drawings is quite fascinating. The second assignment is a whole different ballgame. Very intense and hard, but after all we are here to learn something and while I am working on my post grad assignment simultaneously I can see the learning effects resulting in faster output. I think I’ve spent days on Twitter 2.0 trying to figure out how to save to xml. In my postgrad assignment I am using the same technique and everything flows. Well, kind of. Two projects at one time is very confusing. I tried to let me guide by the marking scheme and stopped once I was sure I’ll get a good grade. There are still some features missing so it’s going to be a long Monday. Calling my postgrad a beta would be lie… Very stressful times. I am spending my days in front of the computer trying to include every feature. But hey, if I think about it, it becomes clear that this is what I like. So it’s cool. Two more days until the presentation I am sure that I learned a lot of things which makes me happy because that doesn’t apply to every subject I took this semester.

Bond World Cup Final

In a couple of hours, two Web Apps students will take part in the Bond World Cup Final. I am talking about soccer, of course. After a long season, Gerpan (Germany and Japan) are facing Latin in the grand final. Lorance and me are part of the Gerpan team and we hope we are going to win. Or do we? The problem with winning is that you have to celebrate and deadlines, especially for Web Apps, are in our heads. It’s a very tricky situation. Do we want to win and waste one whole afternoon (and probably great parts of the evening) or should we lose, take a shower, have dinner and finish our projects?

IT (un-)enabled Group Projects

Four subjects – three group projects. A nightmare for most of the students, including me. Countless meetings, even more mails and a million different documents containing the work of several people. As a Business and IT student I am lucky to have some insight into solutions that make life easier, but unfortunately most of my fellow students (especially the business ones) use a laptop and Office 2003. That’s it. Versioning is a nightmare and real IT enabled collaboration is just not existing. I tried to foster the use of Office Live where groups and work together online – the perfect solution and it’s free (for now). But most people say we don’t need that and that it’s too complicated. Bull*?$!. It’s so easy and it safes time because you don’t have to meet every other day and follow up with countless emails. Especially as a student no matter what your major is, you should know and use the new solutions for collaboration. Everyone’s using Facebook, hardly anyone uses Google Docs or Microsoft’s Office Live.