This week, the interns were given a project of our own, which all of us were told to work on together. The project was creating a test for users of the website, which is something that will be deployed to the actual website once we finish working on it. Being really excited, we wanted to jump into the project snd start coding, but Chip had something else in store for us – We were not to write a single line of code until we had a concrete plan about what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, and what we would accomplish by it.

We spent three whole days on figuring out our entire plan. We had a rough idea of how we wanted the project to look, but a rough idea wouldn’t do. Chip helped us in the first few steps, by showing us how we were to figure out what we needed to do to formulate the plan, and from there, he left it to us. Ultimately, after running through each possible use case and all the pros and cons the application would have, we were able to come up with a ~700 line document that described exactly what we wanted to accomplish, and how we were going to accomplish it. Chip seemed to be pleased with that, so he gave us the thumbs-up to begin working on code designs for the project.

We were split up into two groups, with two of us working on the back end, with the databases and tables for the project, and the others focusing more on the front end, with what the user interface would look like. The front end programmers took off to do some more strategizing and working, and left Quinn and I, both backend workers, to do our job.

Finally, Chip asked us to start the project off by writing basic POJOs (Plain Old Java Object), which we then filled with getters and setters, so that they would be able to handle the passing on information back and forth easily. We worked on this until the end of the week, but now we have a good framework that we should be able to build upon next week, when we begin the real work of implementing everything we came up with. Look forward to reading about how we make progress on our project!