I think this was a really good class for me to take. It allowed me to understand what was possible in addition to fairly judging my limits so far. I think the final class was probably the most beneficial for me because it was both corrective and eye opening.

With my current job, we do a ton of planning and scheduling for interviews and whatnot, but most of our work is done by one or two people in a couple sittings. When I said “eye opening,” I mean it was good to hear from a programmer who was previously working directly in journalism/WaPo because I felt like the logic behind completing assignments in one and the other are completely different.

Most of the work is solitary or with perhaps one other person filling in background information. Whereas in coding, it’s several people building the same final project. I think putting me in the position where I have to dedicate a ton of sittings to one project and work with a number of different people was the most “out of my element” part.

Going off of that tangent, the most immediate “what’s next” change for me would be applying some of those same practices for successful coding projects to my own work. Dedicating more sittings to assignments and asking for more eyes on work rather than just a copy desk and one other person.

As for code-driven plans, I still want to extend my domain into the following year and use it as a host for a short project. It’s not too much of a weighty endeavor, but it also wouldn’t be brief. (I mentioned it in class, but I want to make about 5 different avatars in Pokemon Game Boy fashion and draw boundaries and obstacles for around two levels.

I still have the server on my computer and I want to write out the HTML designs for the unique characters on the test site. It’s something I’d like to add to my resume. Although it’s not necessarily advanced enough to land a job at Sony or Nintendo, it’s still neat to show you have practical knowledge of different fields. I’ll also build off of it, depending on how well it looks after the first couple stages.