Wenguang Xu

The Road Less Travelled (CDM industry project)

 

 

​Programmer, Application designer  January,2014~ April, 2014

 

A mobile application for car drivers that utilize geolocation and related technologies for Roadhouse Interactive. "The Road Less Travelled" incorporates social and gameplay elements into a GPS navigation system to bring innovative and interactive experiences to users.

 

My Roles

Network programmer:   All the Android front end network coding                                                includes Java HTTP networking, multi therad                                          programming, customized event handlers.

 

Generalist programmer: Help with the Android UI programming, save and                                    display data got from HTTP server. Implemented                                    singleton and MVC design patterns into the client                                    side application.

 

Application designer:     Brain storm together with our team and come up                                    ideas for this application.

 

Documentation:             Finished the technical design document for my                                        part of code. Finished my part of internal design                                      document and some of the team blog posts.

 

Challenges

- Have no experience about Java Android API before, need to learn and       use it in a very short period of time for this project.

- This project have a relatively big scope, need both front end Android       and back end server and database implementation. And also none of our   programmers have Android experience before so it is a big chanllege       on time management.

- Do not have much experience of client meetings and this kind of formal     communication skills, improved a lot from this project.

- Do not have much experience with English technical writing before,         need to finish my part of design document for client

- Work with a lot of other programmers, pair programming

- Personally, I have more experience with game design but not                   applications. So it is a chanllege to come up with interesting application     feature ideas.

 

 

What I learned

-Work with other programmers effectively, pair prigramming, also learned  about how to use SVN.

 

-Team communication (communicate with designers, other  programmers  and also in the brain stromming and desin phase tellling people my  ideas)

 Still have improvement space for communication in the client meetings  with clients.

 

-Learned a lot about application design, learned how to use UX design  tools like user flow from client.

 

-Learned a lot about time management and how to work under pressure.  Because of the big scope of this project and underestimate of the  complexity of the server, our server didn't have the core functions  working until about 10 days before final delivery. Front end  programmers had a lot of tasks and need to work very fast before the  due day of the project. I learned a lot about task prioritization and time  management.