As a child, you are thrown in the water so that you learn how to swim. As a Master’s Degree student taking the Distributed Software Development course at PoliMi…
You are thrown into a distributed team of nine so that you deliver an application to stakeholders in four months, with little to no supervision!
We worked from scratch: get requirements from the stakeholder, write a design document, set up a board to track tickets, host some git repos, split into the backend, frontend, and mobile teams, don’t forget about weekly meetings, choose the tech stack and frameworks, share your experience, struggle with merge conflicts, deploy the MVP, get CI/CD running, cover everything with tests, report to the supervisor, add functionality to the API, share new endpoints with the mobile and frontend teams, present the alpha, integrate the gaze tracking SDK, write a custom tool for anonymous peer evaluation just to get your mind off of many-to-many joins, catch the bugs, fix tests, present the beta.
All while you have other courses, labs, work, and some of your peers are writing a thesis. Overwhelming just to the point where you wish you had some extra cores in real life, and when you realize you love this struggle - the teamwork, the complexity, the pieces falling into place sprint by sprint.
The project we built is an app helping kids learn to read. With the help of a moving pointer, and gaze tracking using Visage SDK, the app adapts to the reading speed of the user and gradually increases it guiding the eyes through reading exercises word by word.
Take a peek at the project on GitHub: https://github.com/Kosjenka-Reading-App