My One Assignment
The Class
What did I learn in this course? Well, I did read a lot about interesting topics, like this article where they talk about the scam that was Juicero. It was a bad idea, that was sell to the public like an innovative product, that has to do with the ethics that we should have when developing a product, since they are trusting in the company, the company should be respectful towards it’s users as well. It also serves as an introduction to the question “Should this exist?”, because, just because they could build a product like this doesn’t mean that they should do it.
My favorite topic might be about surveillance. How government and private companies are constantly gathering information about us. Sometimes for them have a better understanding of ourselves for targeting ads, other times to have us under control. An interesting case was the one of Strava, a fitness app that intentionally leaked it’s users routes (that they knew because of tracking). But with it came the fact that the each user was easily linked to each activity record, and that it revealed position of secret military bases. It’s not surveillance in the correct meaning of the word, but the information they leaked definitively could serve for these purposes to third parties.
And also the importance of our online privacy. We should be aware of what we are sharing, and only that, what can be inferred from that that we share. Because now a days these private companies have pretty good algorithms to deduce information about us. Information that could be sensitive. I reflect about this in one of my articles: https://medium.com/smart-citizens/computational-inference-4505a909fa5f.
The Project
Now, changing the subject to our project: I learned a few things along the way. You should be comfortable with the people you are working with. And I want to point out two things about that.
First off, the Alberta team. They were in a completely different page than us. Their objective was aimed much higher than ours. I think it’s important for all members of the team to have similar objectives and vision for the project, if not, well, we just become an obstacle for each other. This is a problem that I will not encounter at work since we all have a common background. In this specific project, we were two groups, doing the project for different purposes, we at Guadalajara just wanted to deliver a school project. Them at Alberta, wanted to satisfy a client with high expectations. So that didn’t work
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Then we have the problem with our group in Guadalajara. I think that, as a team, you have to match as a working team. I like Mike and Carlos outside of work, but when it comes to working with them, I could not help myself to think that I’d be better off without them and the other way around. We were an obstacle to each other constantly, it could be because of conflicting ideas, or that we did not like what the other wanted for the project, or because we miss-understood what the other said. And maybe that’s we some companies spend resources for their teams to be productive, doing team building activities.
Although I considered this project a failure, I did learn valuable things along the way. One thing I did learn is just, React Native. I already knew Android from a previous class, but React Native is a technology used to develop apps quickly and for prototyping, and this knowledge was valuable recently in my work at Wizeline.
As I mentioned earlier, I learned the importance of a good team, the less friction there’s between us, the better. There should also be a variety of skills in the team, we in our team were mostly just monkey coders, we do not know anything about user experience, we don’t know about designing interfaces. For the app to work correctly we should go out and interview some potential users, in order to understand the value of our application and how we should change it to have a greater appeal. And of course we lack the experience and skills to do just that.
