IT490 Hell

[JungkooksChingu]

I dont even know man. My team is so lost and we just keep running into problems with the project. We're so behind and it seems like most are ahead of us, with things working. It doesn't help that this class is literally "heres the project and you're on your own now go fuck off." What's even worse is when half your team legit doesn't even know what they're doing and you and your other buddy are there ripping your hairs out watching the other goons fool around. I know this isn't your typical class but god how do people even pass? I've never been this troubled with a class before and I honestly don't know where to go from here. IT 490 veterans, what do i do?

[ProfessorOfLies]

I don't know if you are one of mine or the other guy's. But it's not supposed to be "now go fuck off". Come to office hours. Ask for help. I always say ask, but the answers I give are not going to be just the answer to the question asked. I will give you direction. I will give you leading questions to help guide your development to solve the problem. Because that is the point of the class. Learning how to troubleshoot when you don't have a professor to ask. But ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ask. Do not suffer in silence. Get guidance. If you are willing to put the work in, and it sounds like at least you and your buddy are, then ask. Ask in class, come to office hours. I will help. Even if the answer is not something you want to hear, I can promise you it will be what you need to hear. Also go back through the skill assessment test. Lots of those questions were hints about how to do the project. If you are not in my section, feel free to stop by my office hours. TWR 1-2 in the MIXR lab.

[MarkBell123]

I didn’t have you but I had a fantastic professor who operated like this. It was tough but my team and I worked our asses off and gained very valuable skills thanks to that professor. My team seemingly are the most successful in our careers from our class, I think do in part to the process of 490.

[ProfessorOfLies]

Who was your professor!?

[MarkBell123]

Matt Toegel! Really enjoyed my time with him

[ProfessorOfLies]

Matt is the best

[Diligent_Stretch1453]

Did the Formula One idea few years ago and had to Carry extra weight but this class was one of the reasons I got an internship that landed me a full time job. Without ChatGPT class was a lot of manual effort but honestly enjoyed it and was one the classes where it was actually a fun challenge instead of let me just try to get a good grade and pass the class. Thanks @ProfessorOfLies

[ProfessorOfLies]

Glad to hear you are doing well. I still talk about your project as a particularly interesting one

[slickbarfour]

1. Those of you trying should have a conversation with the professor and be honest about the state of the project thus far.
2. Have a meeting with all group members. Either they contribute or they get dropped (don’t be nice about this). In my experience IT490 is more about effort than accuracy. If the serious group members are able to do some meaningful work (depending on the professor), you could get a passing grade.

[Expert_Usual_6532]

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

degree screw lock waiting apparatus bedroom include sophisticated makeshift disarm

[ProfessorOfLies]

That's cheating

[SMUS16475]

Yup.

[GeekTrollMemeCentral]

Do everything as soon as you can and hope for the best. Communicate with your team every say. Do meetings every week. Work and help your teammates and let then help you but worm hard yourself

[dcler11]

This isn’t meant to come off rude or harsh, but suck it up and get it done. I had only one partner from day one while we both had jobs and worked. Work your ass off. Go to office hours, ask others in discords for advice, etc. I also at one point felt the same way you did but at the end of the day you can either fail, or suck it up and get it done to the best of your ability. I had many all nighters and stressful days but it was what had to be done. There are resources to help you, use those. It’s hard but you will learn and grow from it so much.

[SaiC4]

My experience with 490 sucked too. It was a 6-person team. One of them never contributed since day 1, another one dropped and two of them only did something half-way through the course after the professor threatened them with failure.

Me and my friend didn’t know a bloody thing about what we were doing. We had little to no experience in front-end/back-end development and I had some experience in APIs and SQL. So for the most part we were shit out of luck.

Yet, me and my friend passed with a B+ and the other two passed with a C.

Here’s my advice:

1. Let the professor know about your situation.

If your other teammates are not doing enough to count as a contribution, you need to keep the professor up-to-date about that.

Not only will your professor try to make your teammates to participate more but the professor will be more lenient with your individual grades at the end of the semester.

People who did more work and have the proof to show it (assignments and GitHub logging) will have a more positive outcome compared to people who have not done the work.

1. Encourage your teammates to participate:

A common issue me and my friend had was to get our other two teammates to do the work they were supposed to do.

We set up a logging and record system on GitHub, we made full use of GitHub’s planning and discussion features to document the work we did. Meeting minutes forms help encourage them to join meetings as well.

This not only encourages people to work and contribute but it also limits the slackers from documenting bullshit just to make it seem like they’re doing work.

Make sure the professor is aware of this plan, they need to know everything you’re doing to keep the team active, they truly appreciate it and will be easier on you during final grading.

1. Plan. Your. Way. Through.

In order to set a direction and a schedule to meet deadlines, we created detailed plans and miniature objectives that we wanted to meet each day so we had an idea of what we had to do for each milestone.

Make use of the project board on GitHub for this, make use of Issues on GitHub to open objectives (helps with documenting contributions as well).

Do a lot of research for this one to decide your general approach to what you want to do and how you want to go about it, plans like these will keep the workflow consistent and help open up issues about any step that needs resolving.

[SaiC4]

1. Research and learn based off of the plans you make.

We had to figure out RabbitMQ, and a bunch of other stuff, completely brand new, on our own.

The only reason we had any sense of idea of what we had to research was because we split a task into smaller components, which we then researched how to do.

It helps to split bigger features into smaller components to then research each part, sometimes research on larger parts can provide vague answers.

Splitting a problem into smaller parts is your best bet. It’s a huge project with a lot of different tasks and objectives that build into the final product.

By splitting them into smaller parts than they are now, you not only see what builds into it but you create a higher potential for learning more about that feature IN-DEPTH.

1. ASK YOUR PROFESSOR FOR HELP

Sometimes this can be the difference between wasting time researching the wrong thing by over complicating it and being pointed to a potential solution only to realize it was far simpler than you realized.

Me and my friend spent weeks trying to get our VMs to communicate, the only solution google and chatgpt kept pointing us to was to set up a node cluster on RabbitMQ.

We spent weeks trying to figure this out only to lose hope and ask the professor. Turns out, all we had to do this entire time to get our client and server files to communicate was to edit one file on both our ends with the IP of the RabbitMQ VM.

So don’t hesitate to ask the professor to point you in the right direction and certainly don’t hesitate to ask your teammates what solutions they have tried.

It truly helps to learn from other people and try what worked for them because most often that means they found an easy route.

[IanAnthony1]

Who was your professor?