Jishnu Mohan

Homepage

View My GitHub Profile

12 October 2014

Locked and Loaded

by Jishnu

What would you do if you got the opportunity to execute literally any idea you felt like for a class project? Get frozen in indecision, that’s what.

There is no one to blame for this idea crisis except myself, especially since the module asked us for ‘dream’ application ideas right at the beginning of the semester. It is probably a sign of learning, then, that most of us have abandoned the ideas we had then - either on grounds of impracticality or on seeing the various flaws and assumptions in the idea.

Being essentially forced to think of an idea, all the while being continually aware that every minute spent in this decision phase is one minute less for execution, is definitely not a good place to be. At this stage, my mentality was quite heavily skewed towards ‘the idea doesn’t matter, the execution does’, just so that we could get started on anything.

I am however quite thankful that at the end of it all, we as a team have decided on something that we all find both meaningful and impactful. For this, we really have Beng and Yang Shun, of NUSModifications fame, to thank. Working with them is awesome for a number of reasons. Firstly, they have worked in the area of developing NUS apps for quite long and are very familiar with its needs and opportunities, so with their feedback we can be quite confident of solving a real need. Also, since they are great developers, we can be reasonably confident that the ideas are technically sensible and can rely on some amount of feedback and help. Finally, while it would be an ‘external’ project - those who would benefit from this idea are NUS developers and by extension, NUS students, allowing us to contribute to a community that we are a part of.

It seems this idea was worth the wait. Now comes the fun part.

tags: university - cs3216