Tabitha Ewert

I like to have things figured out.

I like to know what I’m doing, I like to feel confident in what I’m doing, and I like to think I’m doing things the right way.

Coming into this project last fall—I thought I had things figured out.  School projects were not new to me.  As a business major I’ve worked on many projects—and I think I do pretty well.  How hard could this be?

The first curve ball was when Dr. Alma gave me material to read regarding Scrum.  Scrum?  Sprints?  Backlog?  Agile?  What?

Throughout the fall, I figured out what scrum was.  The process of dealing with a project in chunks rather than all at once.  Having daily meetings to discuss what was to be done.  Meetings that are short (10mins max), done while standing, and giving useful information to the team.  Yeah, I had it figured out.

Then came the spring—and it didn’t seem to work.  Our scrum meetings were useless and I didn’t know why.  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and that confused me.

It took half way through the spring semester when we did a field trip to see scrum in action that the light bulb went on.  Seeing it in action gave us something to go off of.  Our scrum meetings don’t look like the one we watched—but they are much more effective than our first attempts.  We’ve adapted the methodology to fit our needs—and we are much better at communicating now that we’ve adopted this.

But I’m not going to say I have it figured out because the one thing I have figured out is that I don’t have it figured out.

One of the guest speakers we had in the fall told us that the value of our degree was not the knowledge we had stuffed in our heads.  Rather, the value comes from learning how to learn.  That is definitely the case with this project.  I don’t have more random facts—but I’ve learned not to get comfortable with where I am.   I’ve learned to adapt and be ready to change.

In some ways I wish I could go back to the me in September and tell me all the things I’ve learned—but I think the process of coming to the solutions has been as much value as the solutions themselves.

Figuring it out is more useful than having it figured out.

Almost done.

A week and a half and we will be officially wrapping up DyeWorks: A commerce of color.

Right now we are past our feature freeze so all that is left is bug fixing, game balancing, planning the release party and putting up the website.

We have our website up now (http://dyeworksgame.com/) thanks to a combined effort of Alenka, myself, and Matt.  Check it out and download the game to see what we are talking about.  It’s exciting to finally be able to show people what we’ve been working on.  Unlike essays or tests, this part of my education will have a tangible product I can show the world.

Today I’m writing about Joy.

Once again, I got her permission--so no need to worry.

When I first met Joy back in the fall my first impressions of her surprised me.  She’s not the picture I had in my mind of what a programming team lead would be.  What I was expecting was nerdness.  Big glasses, dorky t-shirts with nerd jokes on them, and always talking nerd stuff.  Joy defied this preconceived notion.  She dressed stylish, was quiet spoken, and seemed to be normal.  A programmer is normal?  Well it does happen.

She has come a long way as the team lead for the programming team.  It may be a role she would not naturally thrive in, but she has faced her challenges head on and has adjusted when need be.  She always is patient with me when I’m trying to figure out the technical aspects of what is going on and even tries to explain it sometimes (with varying degrees of success).

This summer we work together on important things (like Tim Hortens runs) and discuss important issues (like the Canucks).  I value her as a programmer, a team lead, a friend, and a normal person.

I’m writing today about Alenka.

Don’t worry; I got her permission to do this.

Alenka and I have been working together a lot over the past couple weeks.  As the Art team lead we have worked together since the beginning of the project, but mostly about administrative details.  In the last couple of weeks that has changed a lot.  Now we are working together on creating a website, research, and of course those administrative details.

However, we approach things very differently.

My style, when it comes to doing anything is to throw something together quickly and spend time afterwards tweaking it until it comes out right.  If it’s a paper, I write a draft as quickly as possible.  It will be rough.  It will be simple.  It will be concise.  But that can change later.

Alenka’s style is to hammer out every detail beforehand so that it’s perfect the first time—and trust me, it often comes out nearly perfect.   When working on the website, she wanted every detail planned out before putting anything together. 

The different styles are, well, different.  But I’ve really enjoyed the process of learning how she likes things done.   I guess that’s the beauty of working on this type of project: the different styles coming together and working.  

It’s the recipe for disaster, but it's also the recipe for brilliance.