Looking back on my semester in ICS 414, it felt like an emotional rollercoaster that I did not know I had signed up for. The class focused on creating a financial management decision tool for Spire Hawaii LLP. At first, it sounded like an exciting challenge. That excitement quickly faded when we were given the materials. Those first few weeks were rough. We received a PDF detailing the financial model along with two Excel sheets. None of it made any sense to me. I kept rereading the documents and tracing through the functions in the Excel sheets, but I still could not piece it together. I genuinely thought about dropping the course because I could not imagine ever understanding the model, let alone building a functioning website around it.
The first milestone presentation felt like stepping into the unknown without any preparation. My team and I were not where we wanted to be. We had no working website to present, just mockups of the pages. It was nerve-wracking, and I was convinced that everyone else was miles ahead of us. To my surprise, seeing the other teams’ progress during the presentations made me feel better. It turned out that many of them were in the same position we were. That realization gave me a sense of relief. After the presentation, my team met up for the first time since the start of the semester. We discussed our next steps and came up with a plan. It was not perfect, but it gave me some clarity and convinced me to stick with the class.
After that, things started to feel more manageable, though we still faced challenges. One of the biggest issues we dealt with was team contribution. It was always the same group of people doing the work while others stayed on the sidelines. That imbalance was frustrating and made the workload feel heavier for those of us who were engaged. We also struggled with GitHub commits throughout the semester. People were merging old commits without updating their branches, which caused our work to get reverted. Fixing those issues sometimes took a really long time. There were moments when I had to rewrite code because nobody noticed the problem until it was too late. The app even crashed a few times because of these merge errors. Looking back, it would have helped to assign someone at the beginning of the semester to approve pull requests and manage the repository.
Despite the challenges, I am proud of what we accomplished. At the start, I felt completely lost and unsure of my ability to contribute. By the end of the semester, I had a clearer understanding of the project and how to solve problems as they came up. That said, when I compare ICS 414 to ICS 314, it is clear how different the experiences were. In ICS 314, we got to choose our own teams, and I had friends in mine, which made collaboration much smoother. There was already trust and familiarity, so it felt easier to split tasks and get work done. The project itself was also less complicated. The website we built in ICS 314 was way more straightforward, so there was less of that overwhelming feeling I had at the start of ICS 414.
ICS 414 really pushed me out of my comfort zone in ways ICS 314 did not. While it was not always smooth and at times even frustrating, those rough moments taught me lessons that I know will stick with me. It forced me to adapt, work with a team of strangers, and handle complex problems.